


All This and Heaven Too

by itsallaboutzarry



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angel Zayn Malik, Angels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Doctor Harry Sytles, Dry Humping, M/M, Slow Burn, There is a lot of death here people so be wary, a lot of original characters die but in a non-graphic way, angst and pining though it's, as graphic as it needs to be, because aren't all my fics slow burns, but there are mentions of death, city of angels au, except my own spin on it, obvious disbelief of being able to see dead people, or not too graphic, second part will be up soon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:00:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 40,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22152148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsallaboutzarry/pseuds/itsallaboutzarry
Summary: Getting serious from one second to the next, Harry clears his throat again and hunches over the counter to get even closer to Moira, so he can whisper, "Can you see anyone standing next to me?""She can't see me," Zayn offers, hoping it'll help, though it's clear Zayn is anything but helpful.A City of Angels AU, where Zayn is following Harry around the hospital in a total non-creepy, most non-stalkerish way possible. If Louis asks, he isn't following him at all. But as far as Harry is concerned, it's the being dead part that's the most confusing.
Relationships: Zayn Malik/Harry Styles, minor Louis Tomlinson/Nick Grimshaw
Comments: 13
Kudos: 46





	All This and Heaven Too

**Author's Note:**

> This is gonna be a long one...  
> I started writing this fic when I watched City of Angels last year, though it didn't look anything like it does right now. It's been a labor of love and frustration, but mostly of thinking there is no way in hell I can possibly ever write something like this. Alas, here we are. It's inspired by the movie, though just the general ideas are similar.  
> This fic comes with a bunch of trigger warnings, so I'd like to advise you to read the tags again and make sure you're not uncomfortable. For more topics discussed in the fic that might be triggering, here's a whole, neat list: mentions of blood, death, dying, hospitals and injuries. For a quick summery, to make extra extra sure, head to the end notes. More trigger warnings will be added with the second installment, but the ending is a happy one!  
> For the disclaimer: I have no knowledge of any medical procedures. Harry is a doctor in this fic and I've done as much research as I could, but I am not to be trusted or believed. I do not know what I'm talking about, it just seems like it.  
> I hope there's no need to disclaim I also have no idea what the afterlife looks like either.  
> The title is taken from Florence and the Machine's song of the same name.

_Hayley – Who said anything about fair?_

Her name is Hayley.

She’s five and three quarters, has big brown eyes and two braids that fall right over her shoulders, tied at the ends with soft pink bows. Nothing was wrong with Hayley – not that Zayn can tell. There’s still nothing about Hayley that Zayn can feel just by looking at her.

She was laughing a few hours ago, listened to a bed time story and went to sleep, peacefully and happy. It’s what she’s remembering now, as the bubbling memories of her joy drift around the top of her head in a bright glow of lights.

It happened between one second and the next. Sometimes, that’s how it is. Sometimes, it happens and no one knows why. Not even Zayn.

As soon as she’s laid underneath the bright fluorescent lights, it’s clear. They all know. The whole room knows that it’s time for little Hayley. Her mother is crying silently in the corner, shaking with her sadness in the old plastic chair. She’s holding a bright red blanket against her chest as she murmurs, “Hayley, honey,” through the beeping and the orders and the somehow simultaneous stilted silence that hangs over them all.

She says it again and again, the words resonating in Zayn’s head as only the purest ones do. Hayley is the only thing she’ll ever think about again. “Hayley, honey,” she murmurs, because Hayley is the _only_ thing she’ll ever think about again.

Zayn wishes he could change that.

He always wants to take this part away, but he’s had to learn a long time ago, that he can’t, because no matter what he does, how long he stays around or how often he comes to visit after, there’s never anything he can do to make it better. None of it makes him stop wishing he could do _something_ for them, though. If not anything else, Zayn wants to at least tell her that Hayley will be safe. That she’ll be happy as she can be and that she’ll be waiting for her until they’re together again. But that doesn’t always help either. It has been a long time of leading people from here to there and it’s taken him nearly all that time to know that the least he does for the ones who stay behind, the better.

Hayley comes to stand next to him in the hallway. They’re both looking through the glass at the doctors still standing over her bed and at her mom in the corner with the red blanket in her arms. As they stand there, one doctor hangs his head and looks over at the clock on the wall.

“What’s your name?”

Zayn looks down at her and smiles. He always smiles when it’s the little ones, because they’re never angry or sad, just curious. And they always ask for his name.

“I’m Zayn.”

She nods, says, “I’m Hayley,” and slowly blinks at him. “Are you an angel?”

Louis likes to take the kids, but in cases like this one, when Louis is already upstairs, holding a tiny hand of his own as he stands in front of another window that’s just like this one, Zayn has to grit his teeth and hold a tiny, small hand as well, smile and say, “Yes, I’m an angel,” even if he’s nothing like the one she’s thinking of.

When he was young, Zayn learned that angels were good, that they were the light and sweet of the world. Angels were something exceptionally pure. They were from heaven, from up above and fairytales and wishes and prayers. They were saviors and saints. But Zayn is nothing like that – he’s darkness and the sour taste in your mouth you can’t rinse out no matter how many times you brush your teeth. He’s from somewhere else; not up above where the sun and the clouds are, but not necessarily from down below either. He’s not a savior and he’s not saint. Zayn’s from somewhere in the middle, because he’s trying to be a good guy. He’s just following orders, really. He’s feeling hearts and pulses slowly fade out and leading them to the light when they do. That doesn’t make him an angel. He hopes it doesn’t make him the devil either.

“You’re pretty,” Hayley says in awe, her eyes on his face instead of her mom. Zayn looks at the now quiet room. The doctors have their heads bowed and her mom is holding Hayley’s hand, her tiny hand in her own as she lays the blanket over her for the very last time.

He tightens his own hold. “We have to go.” It’s warm and soft, her fingers twitching against his palm, but her skin is already pale, not as warm as it was just before.

“Already?” she asks, turning to face the end of the hallway, nearly leading the way herself.

Some of them don’t need to be guided; they know where to go all by themselves. They don’t try to fight when the time comes or bargain to stay just that extra day. Zayn always tells them it won’t change anything, that, one last day won’t make a difference. It just makes it worse to leave. Saying goodbye is what they’re trying to save them from doing, but sometimes, they’re too hopeful and hurt to know better. Sometimes, they’re too young to know at all, but no matter what, Zayn is supposed to tell them that it’s okay, and no matter what, that it’s going to be okay.

“Can I ask you a question?” Zayn sees it, they’re almost there, almost at the end of the hallway. She hums, so he says, “What was your favorite?”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“Ice cream. Out of everything in the whole world,” Louis’ hands are spread out, hardly believing what he’s saying, “She’s gonna miss vanilla ice cream the most. She asked if she could have a scoop when she got there.”

“Oh.” The face Zayn makes says it all really – they hate to make promises they can’t keep. At the end of the day, they could lie and say whatever they wanted to, and that’s usually how it goes at first, when you’re a rookie and don’t know how it accumulates, all the empty promises going unfulfilled stacking one on top of the other, keeping count so you don’t have to. The guilt gets to be too much though, too heavy, so if you’ve been doing it for as long as Louis, but especially for as long as Zayn has, you know to not say anything you don’t mean.

“I told her she could have it,” Louis says briskly, turning his chin up in defiance like he won’t feel the weight of it for a very long forever.

“You know–”

“She was three years old,” Louis cuts him off with an almost ferocious sneer. He gets too into it sometimes, like he forgets where the limits are. Zayn is convinced that Louis forgets what he's meant to be doing here. It's almost like he forgets he isn't alive anymore, that this isn't some sort of job. It just is what it is.

“But that’s…” Zayn can’t find the word for it. The younger they are, the more innocent their wish, and the heavier to carry around.

“It’s worth it.” Louis taps a cigarette out of the case and lights it with a deep sigh that resonates even in Zayn’s chest. As he breathes out that first exhale, they both know this particular line of conversation has been closed. For now.

Louis doesn’t look at him. This is why Zayn doesn’t like doing the young ones. There’s a lot more at stake than with the grownups that know how it goes. The grownups know that this is it whether they like it or not. Or at least it’s like that with the ones who don’t put up a fight. As soon as there’s even a little resistance, Zayn has his hands full with dragging them to where they need to be. Still better that the little ones, if anyone asks him. It’s just too sad. He doesn’t know what he’d do without Louis.

It’s no secret why Louis prefers them, the kids that are now younger than his sisters were when this started for him. Louis always says he still feels like a big brother at heart, but Zayn doesn’t need to hear how Louis thinks he disappointed all of them and how this is his chance to pay them back – like there’s any reason or rhyme to this at all. There’s nothing to it, except resigning yourself to it sooner rather than later.

“What about yours? Hayley, right?”

Zayn shakes his head and lights a cigarette too. He would rather not think about it anymore. They’ve both had a rough morning. “Yeah.”

“And?”

He chuckles around an exhale and says, “Pajamas,” not looking at Louis either now. It’s easier if they both pretend it isn’t as hard as it is.

“Pajamas?”

“Yeah,” Zayn says, actually glad he got to spend a few minutes with Hayley, feeling some of her residual joy in the corners of his own mouth. She was so young, so sweet, and very set on the fact that her favorite were pajamas, the pink ones, with little cat paws for her to tuck her feet and hands into as well. _Most favorite._ “Just pajamas.”

“Lucky,” Louis scoffs, because he knows neither of them are anything close. They’re forever lost, forever here, doing this, over and over again. Louis will get to meet his own Hayley sooner or later, hear about a different pair of pajamas, with bunny ears maybe. “What happened?”

Sometimes, it doesn’t make sense. They’re not sick or hurt and Zayn has to make sure he’s at the right place, as if he doesn’t feel their heartbeats from miles away. Hayley was just fine yesterday, when she was eating honey rings for dinner. She was perfect. And then she wasn’t, then she wasn’t anything. “Her heart stopped beating.”

“Heart attack?” Louis asks, like he always does. Zayn is more interested about their favorites and Louis wants to know what did it. It’s always the same, every day. At least it’s something for them to do.

“No. It just… Her heart just stopped.” It’s better if there’s a reason, somehow, because that way her mother wouldn’t stay awake at night wondering. If there was a reason, she would’ve known and have the comfort of that knowledge, but she doesn’t and now she’s going to keep wondering until Zayn can tell her that it wasn’t her fault. He knows it’s wrong and that he shouldn’t, but he can’t wait for Hayley’s mom to finally see him, just so he can explain. “They were asleep when it happened.”

“Her parents?”

Zayn shakes his head. He doesn’t want to say it out loud. Not where Louis can hear him. “Single mom.”

“Fuck.” Zayn pretends he doesn’t see Louis press his hands into his eyes. “Why is it always single parents?”

Zayn shrugs as he looks over at Louis moving his hands around in a frustrated wave and dropping ash all over his jeans. It’s always the single moms and dads, the young ones, the old ones and they’re always sweet. Except when they aren’t and they’re middle aged and if you ask Zayn – or Louis – sometimes, they deserved what they had coming. It’s not always single parents or kids, but it does feel like that right now.

“Her name was Whitney, twenty-something and,” Zayn wants to be optimistic, knows that some people manage to recover from it, that it doesn’t bring everyone down to that point where Zayn and Louis know their name. But losing your kid like that, so young the both of them... “And she brought a blanket for Hayley to the hospital.”

These are the things Louis wants to hear. If it’s because he wants to know, so he doesn’t lose touch with reality and go insane from it, or if he just wants to see if anyone is like him, with his sisters and brother and husband and son, Zayn doesn’t know. They sit on top of the Hollywood sign, smoke two cigarettes each, one for the good and one for the bad, and Zayn tells Louis everything he wants to know.

Louis still knows how long it’s been for him, because it hasn’t been long at all. Zayn knows it’s been five years of having a friend to do it with, even if the though is as twisted as this whole thing is. But Zayn doesn’t know for himself anymore – time starts to move differently after a while, when you pass the point of keeping track and one day burns into the next and the next and all the rest after that, like a conveyor belt rolling towards the infinite forever. He just knows it’s been a while.

When Zayn flicks the second cigarette through the air, he checks his watch. “It’s almost noon,” he reminds Louis, because he still has to.

“Yeah, yeah,” Louis gets up with a groan. He twists around and bends over until his back cracks. “I know. You coming over? We could make you coffee or something?”

Zayn has errands to run. There are people he can already feel, some he thinks are getting closer to it and an anomaly shaped like a very pretty doctor. Mostly, he’s going to go look for him, though he does like to see how the ones whose hearts are already nearly in the tips of his fingers are doing.

“Nah, I’m gonna–” Zayn flails his hand about and Louis nods understandingly. It’s weird and awkward and though only a little, it’s also uncomfortable every time Zayn does take him up on the offer of coffee or dinner. Still, there’s only so many times in a row he can say no to him, so he’s quick to add, “I’ll come by when I’m done though.”

“Sure. I’ll tell Nick,” Louis beams.

“No funny business.”

And then he grins like only Louis can. “Can’t promise you that, Malik.”

He’s gone before he even finishes talking.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

At the end of the day, after a confused truck driver gets himself lost three separate times, an eighty-five year old grandma of seven, and another few cigarettes smoked around town, Zayn finally strolls down the hallways of Angels Memorial like he always does, pretending he’s being casual about it like always does too.

Angels Memorial has always been a place Zayn’s been drawn to and not just because so many people die there either. That would be too morbid even for Zayn. There’s been a heartbeat for a few months now that has been practically calling him there. A steady, determined _thump thump thump_ that skips here and there, accelerates every time an ambulance pulls up at the ER and only rarely winds down to something calm.

Louis worked at the hospital before. He was a junior psychologist with a tiny office in the basement. Zayn doesn’t remember him from then. Louis’ friend though, Zayn’s known for a while. It’s also where Zayn and Louis met, where they stood, at the end of the bed, watching as the doctors tried to do everything they could, sending shocks to the heart and pumping air into Louis’ lungs. Louis kept staring at himself, lying on the bed, pale and lifeless. And then there was nothing else, no pull, no light, no end of the hallway to walk to and nowhere else to go.

It’s not an exact science. Zayn’s not sure there’s any logic behind it at all, because it’s not like you’re whooshed to some fancy office where the person in charge sits you down and tells you what’s what. It’s surprisingly nothing like it is in the movies. The only sense that Zayn’s been able to make of it is that someone has to be here, in the thick of it, taking care of the people so they don’t get lost on their way to the other side. Just like Zayn, Louis got left behind too. That’s all Zayn knows.

And while Louis is here during the night and early mornings, when Nick is sleeping and Louis isn’t because they don’t anymore, Zayn’s here now, during the morning and afternoon shift and the dinner rush – whatever that means when time really is nothing but a number.

But here is a place where they change the sheets after every patient, yet the smell always stays. It lingers in the thread count, on the pillows, seeped into the walls and deep in Zayn’s bones by this point. Here is where a shower doesn’t help to get rid of the smell, and neither does burning your scrubs. You can try to break an ammonia tablet and sink your head into a bucket of ice cold water, but here, you’re still going to smell like death.

Harry thought it would be sour, the smell, like lemon or vinegar, moldy bread or a yogurt a week after its best before, rotting at least, because you don’t imagine death will smell sweet. But then you also don’t think the thought of death would carry your mind to the time you were standing with your toes in the sand, the waves coming and going, coming and going, getting closer as you stand there, but never quite reaching your feet, with the wind in your hair and your head thoughtless. But it does, because the air smelled sweet like the fabric softener clinging to his clothes and salty like the ocean. It smelled like he was alone, like he’d be for a long time, which is as close as Harry can get if he’d have to describe death. Something sweet, surprisingly light like a breeze and lonely. Petrifyingly lonely.

Death smells a lot like Zayn does.

They change the sheets and they mop up the floors, doctors burn their scrubs with bleach, but once you’re around it all day, even your insides start smelling like death. And after a while, you start feeling like it too.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Zayn feels the _thump thump thump_ before he sees him coming. His name is Harry. He’s tall, has greasy hair that tends to fall into his eyes if he doesn’t tie it up at the top of his head and Zayn’s never seen him out of his scrubs. He gets to meet most of Harry’s patients, which is a startlingly bad statistic for a regular physician, but quite a solid one for an ER doctor. Or a trauma surgeon. Even after all the years, Zayn still doesn’t know which is which and who does what.

Zayn knows a few things about Harry though. Some of which are from Louis going on and on about his best friend who works at Angels Memorial and has a sadder and more pathetic life than even Zayn and Louis. But also from what Zayn’s seen himself. Not that Zayn spends most of his time standing in the middle of the ER waiting for Harry, because that would be weird and creepy. Zayn’s not _that_ pathetic. He does watch from the sidelines though, walks the hallways and peers into the rooms he feels a certain heart beating. That one particular heart that’s just always somehow right there.

Zayn sees Harry practically every day, has been seeing him for months on end now, but he’s never consciously followed him around before. Sure, Zayn might have moved in the same spaces of the hospital as Harry, but that’s because he was mostly following his patients around. Not Harry. Not until now.

Harry has those sad, not-really-bouncy-anymore-because-they-need-a-good-scrub-and-conditioner curls, eyes that are never not outlined by deep-set purple circles, dark blue scrubs, some kind of orthopedic shoes that Zayn wouldn’t be caught dead in – he can make jokes too – and a stance to him, with his wide shoulders and slim waist, that looks both too thin, weak and menacing at the same time. There’s also a kind of settled seriousness, like he can’t get out of some sorrow or misery, all around his eyes that’s causing premature wrinkles.

Unlike most of the time, Harry isn’t shouting orders and his scrubs are barely smudged, both of which are good things in a hospital like Angels Memorial, because it means that no one is either dying or has died on Harry’s watch yet. But they’re not – not when it comes to Harry.

Harry is sitting in the middle of the hallway Zayn finds him in sometimes. It’s a dark and stale, desolate corner of the hospital that barely anyone walks through. It’s between the ER and the orthopedics wing, but the door on the other end is locked. So. Less than barely anyone uses the hallway. Except Harry. When Zayn’s can’t find Harry anywhere in the hospital – not that he looks for him – it’s usually here that he finds him hiding.

Harry is covered by a dark gray shadow, sitting right on the floor between one broken, empty bed and another, with his knees pressed tight against his chest, head on top of his knobbly bones. Maybe it’s that sight along or the fact that he’s crying – Zayn’s never seen him crying before – quietly, like he’d rather he wasn’t, but still shaming with it enough for Zayn to track and count his hiccups, or, maybe it’s just the simple beat of Harry’s heart, calm but jumpy that Zayn feels inside his own chest, but definitely shouldn’t, that makes Zayn stop in his tracks two steps away from him, thinking something along the lines of, _Oh shit._

Zayn stands there, half turned to stone, half fascinated and a little smither of him sorry too. He’d like to think he’d never want to feel another heartbeat again if he could help it. He likes to think about it, how peaceful that would be, if he could just float around without any objectives, without a single reason. How peaceful it would be if he could finally move on to wherever it is he’s guiding all those people. Thoughts of who would do it instead of him creep up on him every times he does, though, because all those people would still need help to find their way, a hand to hold, or the world would get very crowded very quickly with wandering, confused, lost souls.

For all he likes to complain to Louis though, and how pointless his existence feels as he wanders the hallways of the hospital himself, confused and lost, Zayn wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he didn’t have this.

It’s never been like _this_ before though. It’s never It’s never been like this before, though, it’s never felt like he actually has a heart again, all warm and healthy and beating away the seconds like a bit of a slow clock. The beating has never felt like it belonged to Zayn, and now, strangely, as he can’t stop staring at Harry, it does. Sure he feels and hears people’s hearts right before they’re about to give out, but never so strongly and never this loud.

Zayn sits down against the opposite wall, sliding down in a similar if less shaky heap, and just looks at Harry, not unlike he does when he gets the chance, which isn’t often, because Harry very rarely stays still for longer than a few seconds. He jumps from one patient to the other, sutures wounds and establishes airways, calls for nurses and deals out orders with what looks like barely any thought at all from the sidelines. He eats on the go, takes too few breaks if the head nurse has anything to say about it and she usually does, and goes home for fractions of time in between.

So now that Zayn has the chance, he observes Harry – how he’s hunched over himself, hugging his knees, how his eyes are closed shut, how small his ears are. Zayn leans his head to the side and listens to his heart. Harry is just sitting there, alive and well, and though Zayn’s never doubted it before, had never even begun to question it, he doesn’t know, has no idea whatsoever, why he can feel Harry’s heart. All Zayn knows for certain is that it’s not quite Harry’s time yet.

It’s the only sign they get, a heartbeat in their fingertips, that it’s someone’s time. The heart Zayn hears beating stops beating sooner or later and it’s almost always sooner. It’s a thing of intuition now, something Zayn thought he lost a while ago, but though the thump is there, loud and clear and pulsing as it should be, it’s his gut that’s telling him something is off with this one. For how much it feels right, it feels just as foreign and wrong and misplaced. It almost feels like Harry’s heart has just wandered off for a bit. Like it got lost and confused.

Harry stands up suddenly, sniffs in hard, brushes his hand under his nose and wipes at his eyes, takes a deep breath through his mouth, and then he’s off, walking down the hallway that Zayn knows goes right back to the ER. And Zayn, well, he goes right after him, because it’s not like he has anything better to do.

He doesn’t know why he ends up following Harry around all day, as well as the next and the day after that too, because having nothing better to do isn’t an excuse that Zayn would justify doing anything since he’s started walking the hospital hallways. He’s pretty sure he’s lying to himself anyway, though, so it doesn’t matter either way.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Harry is clenched from head to toe. When he pushes past the swinging doors and walks right into chaos, he doesn’t so much as flinch. Zayn doesn’t either, but then maybe that comes with the kinds of jobs they have.

Zayn follows him to a patient, lying on the bed with his leg cut open from knee to ankle. It’s an angry sort of wound, but when Harry walks up to the boy, glancing at his chart and snapping his gloves on, he says a happy if a bit tight, “Slipped in the bathroom, huh?”

The boy blushes around his wince as Harry turns his leg closer so he can see. “Yeah. Yeah, bathroom,” he stutters out as he cringes at the pain.

There’re too many beds to count. All around the walls, the big five beds always occupied on center stage, and then up against pillars, just right in the middle of the room, because the space is tight and they make do with what they have. There’re too many beds and too many people screaming either orders, questions or in pain. There’s a constant cough in the air. Blood has been stained into the lines between the tiles at this point. The air smells sweet.

Harry sits down on a wheely stool, puts glasses on and along with a nurse, they get the wound clean and stitch it right up, all the while the boy keeps whimpering and trying to move around on the bed.

“Do you think,” Harry says as he’s getting the last couple of stitches done, “Do you think that something, maybe, made you fall in the bathroom?”

“What – What do you mean?” The boy winces again and tries to squirm away from Harry’s hands.

Harry shrugs nonchalantly. It makes the nurse snort behind her facemask. “Maybe it wasn’t an accident that you fell. Something could’ve, I don’t know… gone wrong.” Harry glances up at the boy for only a second before he goes back to suturing. “Do you think that’s possible?”

“No, I fell. I fell.”

“It’d be okay if you didn’t. We wrote it down already, so it’s in the file, right?” He looks up at the nurse and she nods.

“Already in the system.”

“See, Moira here’s put it in the system. Nothing we can do to change it now.” Harry cuts the suture thread with a pair of scissors in a flourish. “All done.” He snaps his gloves off as Moira goes to clean around the wound again. “Now, do you think that maybe you didn’t fall in the bathroom?”

The boy gives him the same look that Louis gives Zayn when he tells him something he doesn’t want to hear, and while Zayn’s learned to steer clear of it, it looks like Harry’s almost pushing for it.

“Maybe I didn’t,” the boy allows, shifting again as Moira finishes with him. He sits up on the bed, huffing out a breath and looking anywhere else but at Harry. “Maybe I got in a fight with someone and they pulled a knife on me. I fell down and they got me. Maybe.”

Like he’s settled just to know the truth, Harry sighs. “Next time you come in here, try not to lie. It makes my job easier.”

“You would’ve-”

“He wouldn’t, sweetie,” Moira says, her hand a weight against the boy’s shoulder, though if it’s a comfortable one, Zayn can’t tell. He’s more interested in the stern look Harry’s giving him.

“You’d be surprised how many shaving accidents we get here.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

When Harry goes to the desk to scribble in a couple of files, Zayn goes to stand against the closest wall, so he can keep an eye on him as well as hear how Moira says, “All good?” as soon as she’s close enough.

“Peachy,” Harry drags out like the word has at least a hundred pounds. He sighs down at the papers and Moira bursts out in laughter.

“Oh come on, he wasn’t so bad.”

Harry snorts, “For all we know, he was trying to rob someone or in the middle of a double homicide or something.”

“Oh, yeah, because serial killers are usually prepubescent boys with bad acne and school bags.”

Harry stares at her for five long seconds before he murmurs, “I didn’t say he was a serial killer, did I?”

But pretending like she didn’t hear him, which Zayn admires, really, Moira says, “You haven’t eaten yet, have you?” because she probably knows Harry better than the back of her hand.

“I hate you, you know,” Harry says easily, even smiling as she goes behind the desk where the piles and piles of manila files are stacked up precariously well. “Like, from deep inside of me, I really hate you.”

“I hate you too, so we’re even, but I’d still like it if you didn’t collapse from malnutrition.”

“Malnutrition,” Harry grumbles. “I ate breakfast.”

“So you ate twelve hours ago. Congratulations, demented nana Green in room one-two-eight keeps a better eating schedule than you,” Moira deadpans with a completely straight face. Zayn can’t help but chuckle.

Right when Harry slaps the file on the desk with what Zayn is expecting to be a great comeback, a siren wails outside, the doors swing open and it’s chaos again.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

_Stephan – I’ll be right behind you_

The boy, Stephan, comes in with barely anything left for his heart to pump. As soon as he’s through the door, it seems like everyone rushes to his side even if it’s just Harry, Moira and another nurse. Zayn keeps his eyes on Harry as he runs to his stretcher before Stephan is even fully through the door. Harry always rushes towards sirens, tripping over his own feet as he does, but he propels this time, jumps nearly too fast for his body to follow.

There’s a lot of red – a dry brownish hue along a vivid, lively red, the kind that still had so much life to give, an almost-breathing-red crusting alongside the murkiness already dried on Stephan’s t-shirt. There’s so much red, Harry’s dark blue scrubs don’t even stand out against it anymore, just bleed right into it even as Harry’s hunching over Stephan and snapping on new gloves.

In the time it takes Harry to shout, “What’ve we got?” Zayn can already feel Stephan’s heart.

However long it’s been, Zayn will never get used to that, the _thump thump_ in his hands that’s only there when someone is dying. He can feel their regret, the promises they won’t be able to keep, the best and the worst days of their lives. Like an avalanche it pours over him and buries him under everything they’ve ever felt.

Stephan would’ve called his little brother more often, checked up on him like a big brother is supposed to. Louis felt that too, the bitter regret of everything he should’ve done better, more often and while he still had the time. Baseball, Stephan wants to play baseball. He wants to call Celine and tell her he’s sorry – he doesn’t even want to be forgiven; he just wants to apologize again for being so stupid with her. It’s a nice sentiment that Zayn doesn’t always get to feel in those last minutes. Even if it’s too late, it still counts. It always does.

“Car versus him, the other guy is a minute away.”

Harry nods and without a word, Moira is at his side.

“27 year old male.” They always start with age. Zayn never knows exactly how old they are unless he’s standing here, on the center stage, at the end of bed number three, while everyone whirls around him in a flailing dance of ‘will they, won’t they.’

“BP is eighty over fifty, hypotension, fluids are wide open.”

Harry cuts away what’s left of Stephan’s t-shirt.

“Multiple neck and chest lacerations,” Harry presses his fingers against the deepest one, smudging the gloves in Zayn’s least favorite shade of red, “all coagulated. One open wound above the spleen. Possible interior rapture there.” It’s deep, that’s why. Too deep. Stephan’s heart is thumping away.

Everyone around bed three is listening to him, but to an invisible observer, Harry is talking to himself, taking himself through what’s what from ‘there’s nothing we can do’ to pumping Stephan full of O-neg and morphine, dripping it all in as fast as he possibly can.

They turn him over before Harry’s done, has it all figured out, has a plan. “Start him on EBL, 400 cc. Hey. Hey, what’s your name?”

It’s Moira that says, “Stephan Lauran,” but it’s Harry’s hands on the side of Stephan’s face, turning his head so he can watch Stephan blink and blink and blink and not respond.

“Stephan, can you hear me?”

He can, but he can’t tell Harry that, can’t make his mouth work. It’s too dry and his lips are stuck together tightly with something like glue. He can’t open his eyes to blink another time in a yes, because they’re too heavy. It probably feels a lot like being buried by an avalanche too, not being able to do more than breathe and hope you have more than a few minutes left. And Stephan does, just not much more than that.

Stephan gets hooked up to the monitors Zayn recognizes but doesn’t know exactly what they’re there for. He’s been here before plenty of times, right in the center of it all, but he’s never paid as much attention to what is going on beyond the _thump thump_ and Harry whirling around. He doesn’t know what the beeping means, what Harry is doing and why he’s doing it. Zayn doesn’t understand any of it beyond the simple ‘we’ve done everything we could do’ that keeps flitting around his head.

Zayn knows Moria is pumping air into his lungs, making sure Stephan keeps breathing, but she only manages a good handful before one of the machines goes crazy with red numbers flashing.

It’s during those handful of pumps that something goes wrong and whatever it is, makes Harry jump back to Stephan’s head, dealing out orders like, “Where’s the ultrasound?” and “No, less, less, he’s drowning in oxygen.” No one’s asking if Harry’s sure, if he actually knows what he’s doing. By the way his hands are shaking, Zayn would say he doesn’t. The way Harry’s eyes are rolling all over Stephan’s body, like he doesn’t know where to start don’t reassure Zayn at all and neither does Stephan’s heartbeat.

But then as soon as Harry’s holding the ultrasound against Stephan’s neck, he’s steady, solid, his eyes focused and his hands perfectly still. Zayn doesn’t say it out loud, barely lets himself think it with Stephan right there, but Harry looks calm.

At least he does until he sees the wild thumping flash on the tiny blue and yellow screen. Then all the air whooshes out of Harry in a single breath of, “Fuck, it’s his carotid.”

“Wow, that’s a real bitch,” another doctor pipes up on the side and immediately ducks his head at the look Moira gives him.

Frowning at it for a second longer, Harry snaps off his gloves and says, with a steadily serious expression, “Yeah, it really is.” He gives the doctor a look as well, that Zayn’s sure is supposed to tell him something, but he doesn’t know exactly what. It’s fucking scary though.

The doctor, in fresh green scrubs and a stethoscope around his neck that won’t do Stephan any good looks back at Harry with wide, eager to please eyes that say more an intern than a doctor, more following than making orders, more ready to cry than steady or sure. The doctor doesn’t look calm at all, Zayn knows that much.

Without so much as a second glance, but with a definite jab of Moira’s elbow, Harry rattles off, “Stephan, twenty-seven, hit by DUI,” and the boy hurries to write it all down on a clipboard. “Multiple lacerations on his neck, torso, internal bleeding, ruptured spleen.” Harry takes a breath, unlatches the bed. “Push another 10 of etomidate, please. Then call OR and tell them you’ve got a ruptured external carotid.”

The boy’s hand flies to his own neck. Harry sighs and pushes Stephan’s bed towards him as two masked scrubbed-up people start to drag wet mops around the floor.

“Not you. Him.”

“But, if he has a – He’ll die in the elevator.”

Moira and Harry look at each other. It’s sort of a mix of ‘not the brightest, still has so much to learn, I feel bad and why is he still standing there?’ all bunched into a second of eye contact that Zayn wants to punch them both for.

Moira nods and Harry says, “Yes. Call the OR and go.”

“But–” If Zayn was closer, he’d hear him whimper.

“Doctor Horan.” Harry’s eyes at least flash with something like remorse, though he’s still all clenched and tight and wound up so that Zayn thinks if he could touch him, he’d shatter into tiny little pebbles. “We need to do everything we possibly can. He needs an OR and a cardiologist, so we’re taking him up there.”

“Right, yeah.” Horan nods and though slower than Zayn would expect him to, he grabs a hold of the bed. “On it, Doctor Styles.”

Before any of them have time to blink, there’s another siren wailing outside and a monitor starts beeping in the corner of the room. Harry jumps to get to the ambulance and Moira rushes to the noise.

But it’s all in a day’s work. Wishing they could’ve done more and knowing that ‘everything’ isn’t always enough, Zayn sighs and follows Stephan and Doctor Horan to the elevator.

There’s about a minute and a half left.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

There’s a chance Harry is a human-sized and shaped copper nickel – he has moments of ease where his shoulders don’t touch his ears and he looks at other things besides his own shoes and the floor as he walks around the hospital. It’s moments when he checks in on his patients and walks through the door with a smile instead of the frown that was there not even moments ago, that the coin flips. But it’s all the same piece of metal

Moira makes him eat a banana after they take care and stabilize Misha, and then a yogurt after another round of sirens Zayn would rather not hear ever again in his life.

It’s always a frantic rushing stampede to the door and then the bed and then to the center stage if it’s bad enough which it almost always is. They have a few walk-in headaches and flues, a couple dehydrations and a heart attack that’s going to pull through, but Zayn doesn’t know any of their names. It’s just that he’d rather not remember if he doesn’t absolutely have to.

Thankfully, he doesn’t. He just keeps stepping along Harry’s footsteps one at a time as the day goes by.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It’s at the end of Harry’s shift later that week that they walk to the elevators. Zayn is standing right next to him, looking at the slope of his nose and his closed eyes, wondering if he dares to reach his hand out and feel at his chest just to make sure, extra sure, it’s actually Harry’s heart that’s still a steady weight in his own chest. It’s not that Zayn has to, not really, and it’s not that he wants to either, it just happens that he keeps following Harry around.

If anyone asked, Zayn would say he can’t help it and it wouldn’t even be a lie, because he can’t. Ever since that first time, that nearly knocked him over, because Zayn could tell it wasn’t a dying heart that he could suddenly feel inside of himself, there’s been a pull. Along with Harry’s unusually loud heart, Zayn can feel something pulling him by his threads. Nothing more than a string, tied at one end to Harry and at the other to Zayn, it’s a tangible force that steers Zayn left and right, wherever it is that Harry goes. For such a fragile, thin, barely anything at all thing, Zayn hasn’t been able to cut it loose.

Not that he’s sure he’d want to cut it loose in the first place.

It’s because of that string that Zayn’s days have been getting increasingly more frantic as he keeps hanging around the ER and the center stage, keeps following Harry around. Especially when he goes to check on his other patients, the ones in ICU or in general admission, split between various specialties, because something in Harry softens when he sees the people he’s stabilized and saved are doing much better than when he first met them. Harry manages a smile, even a joke here and there, and Zayn can’t help but blush with the feeling that blooms somewhere in his chest at the sight of Harry holding a patients hand while they tell him stories of who they are, explaining who he saved. Along with frantic, Zayn can feel his days getting more and more obsessive as well. He’s not sure he wants to do anything about that either.

As the elevator finally pings, Moira walks past Harry, slides her hand along the small of his back and says a quiet, “Try to get some sleep, alright?” without stopping to give Harry a chance to say more than, “Still hate you.”

Harry doesn’t even open his eyes to say it.

Moira laughs and says, “Hate you right back,” as him and Zayn step onto the elevator and Harry presses the button to close the door.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

_Emanuel and Paolo – Answer your phone_

The elevator ride is quiet. Besides the groaning of the old wires, Zayn can barely hear Harry’s heartbeat. He can barely hear him breathing too, but it’s there, the occasional heavy exhale along the _thump_ , pause, _thump_.

There’s a ping when they reach the fourth floor. They walk, Zayn behind Harry, down the hallway and then to the left, Harry’s pace slowing the further into the hospital they go. They stop in front of an open door, where Harry leans on his shoulder and leaves just enough room for Zayn to peek through to the bed.

It’s the brothers from last weekend, Emanuel and Paolo. They’re three years apart from what Zayn remembers. The difference is clear now though, Paolo is obviously older – something about the line of his stiff shoulders, how he holds himself, how quiet his prayers are. Paolo carries himself like a man who knows what it’s like to fuck up and know better later, when it’s just a little bit too late.

Emanuel is the one lying on the bed, where the sheets are pulled up to his chest and the IV still drips, drips, drips into the back of his hand. Last week, Harry got Emanuel in his ER with a serious head injury, broken wrist, fractured clavicle, shattered shoulder and some bruising around his pelvis they said they’ll keep their eyes on. They’re both construction workers, the brothers, both working on the cranes up high in the sky. Now Emanuel knows why they’re always secured with two ropes when they make their way up. One of them is the backup if the first fails. Because sometimes, the first safety rope can fail.

Standing there just looking at the brothers, Harry takes his phone out of his pocket and sees there’s a text from Nick – _Your godson misses you_ – sighs down at it like it’s difficult to read, and looks back up at the brothers. Zayn is quite sure of the meaning behind the glaze over Harry’s eyes, but it’s during the last few weeks that Zayn’s learned about Harry’s reluctance to text back or to answer his phone or to downright refuse any and all communication with people. The only one that seems to be getting through to him has been Moira. At least she gets Harry to eat his meals.

Even more than yesterday or any of the days before that, Harry looks a little sad, slightly sympathetic around the edges and like there’s something incredibly heavy drowning all of it out. He looks exhausted and reluctant.

Zayn knows that Emanuel will be fine. Paolo will never let Emanuel out of his sight ever again and Emanuel is going to carry a lot of regret around as well as a few metal pins and knowledge of what the alternatives could’ve been – for the worse and for the better.

Sighing, Harry turns around and gets his phone out of his pocket again. When Zayn sees him dialing a number, he stands further back to give Harry at least a little bit of the privacy he’s taken from him. The conversation doesn’t last all that long, but by the end of it, Harry looks both lighter and even more burdened. Zayn guesses it’s a give and take situation.

After that, when it seems as if Harry can’t stand there even a second longer, Zayn does something he’s never done before. He keeps following Harry.

It’s not like it’s a conscious decision on Zayn’s part, it really isn’t, because he doesn’t just decide that today’s going to be the day he follows Harry all the way out of the hospital and even further than that. It sort of just happens.

Sure, Zayn wants to know more about Harry – Zayn wasn’t to know everything about Harry – and though he’s thought about it, he can’t ask Louis about it, because that would mean asking Louis about what him and Harry were like before… well, before. However much information Louis does have, asking him would involve telling him, and that’s not something Zayn’s willing to do. At least not yet. And only because he doesn’t quite know how.

There’s always been bits and pieces he’s told Zayn. Harry’s a doctor still, but I don’t this he’s doing that well. Harry was the funny one and I was the crazy one, so we just fit together. When Trevor told him that his absolute favorites were lemon slices, Louis couldn’t stop talking about how Harry’s favorites were lemon slices too. Louis would say how Nick was trying to get Harry to talk to him, but couldn’t get him to pick up the phone ever since, well, after.

It’s still curious to Zayn, how he listened and knew all about Louis’ doctor friend, who Louis introduced Nick to first, who’s Teddy’s godfather, who Louis misses and worries about the most. Though Zayn was there, he doesn’t remember that Nick was the person Harry had to give the news to – the ‘we did everything we could’.

It was Harry who told Nick that no one ever knows what do when… well, when. But Harry never mentioned that doctors don’t know either. _No one_ knows what to do… after.

It didn’t occur to Zayn that Louis’ Harry was his Harry, until one day, while all three of them were in the ER, Louis pointed him out and said, “See that’s him. That’s Harry.”

Zayn had thought, yeah, it is. It was also the first time Zayn had thought about telling Louis about the whole, “Hey, I can totally feel Harry’s heartbeat, but something tells me it’s not exactly his time to die yet, since I've been following him around for oh, two months now and I have less than zero fucking idea what’s going on. Thoughts?” But Zayn can’t. He can’t do that Louis, because he knows for certain that Louis will panic. Panic and cry and try to talk to Harry, even though he knows that’s not how it works.

Zayn also doesn’t want to. He wants to keep Harry hidden away, safely tucked in the space between his ribs, right where Zayn can feel his ever present heart, because maybe that way, it never had to be Harry’s time and they can just keep doing this following thing forever. Or Zayn could do this following thing forever. So there. Zayn’s choosing to be selfish and keep this one single thing to himself. Sue him.

Zayn has been around Harry all day today. It’s unprecedented, but they’ve had a good day in the ER, so Zayn hasn’t been pulled to the side to hold someone’s hand for more than eighteen hours in one, so he’s lingered. Around the center stage and hospital beds, down at the nurses’ station and in the break room, Zayn’s been following Harry through his entire shift. It’s after the last six hours of standing on his feet without so much as a tired groan that Moira sends Harry home with a banana, an orange juice box and a promise he’ll get himself some actual lunch and then rest. “A lot of rest, Styles, promise me.”

“I make no such promises.”

“How you don’t pass out as soon as you get home is beyond me.”

“It’s your amazement that keeps me up at night,” Harry smiles all wide and bright at her. To say it doesn’t reach his eyes would be an understatement.

“Oh, just go home already.”

So Harry does. Or he doesn’t really, the sneaky bastard, because as Zayn starts to follow him, they don’t get past that hallway that Harry seems to love so much. The one no one ever passes through other than him. It’s dark and smells stuffy, and you’d think it’d be right up Zayn’s alley, being the grim reaper of sorts, but Zayn’s always preferred sunny days and open-floor designs where air actually circulates instead of just stands still with all its dust.

Harry at least lies down on a bed this time instead of collapsing down against a wall. He doesn’t usually go for a bed, even when he’s here for the quiet to just give himself a few minutes of rest. Thinking about it, it’s probably the only thing Harry does to rest in this place.

When Harry presses his phone against his ear, Zayn almost turns around to give him some space, but he thinks better of it this time. Who cares anyway, it’s not like anyone’s going to know if Zayn lingers and listens in on Harry’s private conversation. Besides, it’s not Zayn’s fault he’s felt unsettled any times he’s left Harry’s side since the first time he’s heard his heartbeat.

“Hey,” Harry says, more brightly than he has anything since Zayn’s been around. “I’m good, yeah. Busy, like always.”

Then Harry hums for a couple of seconds before saying, “I know, I know. I’m free tomorrow, though. I can come by.” The look on his face doesn’t say ‘I’m looking forward to it’, but Harry manages to make himself sound like it. “I’ll bring cookies. Gluten free. The healthy stuff.”

He laughs, though it sounds a bit forced and then agrees with a quieter, “Yeah, you too. See you tomorrow.” With a roll of his eyes, he adds, “Promise.”

It’s a bit like he flips a switch when he hangs up, because Harry’s shoulders sag just that tiny bit with his heavy sigh. In the time it takes him to put his phone back into his pocket, he’s closing his eyes again and rubbing at his forehead.

Harry’s disposition stays with him in the changing room – where Zayn does in fact turn around to give him some privacy, even though he really, really doesn’t want to – and all the way out of the hospital, out on the street, five blocks down and then two to the left, into the grocery store, where he actually, all of a sudden, manages to smile at on-sale grapes. It's astonishing to see Harry, who is emotionally stunted on all accounts and in all other situations, smile at grapes so easily. Really, though, it’s lovely.

Zayn can’t help himself. He walks up to the grapes displayed on their very own stand once Harry is done with them and picks up a bunch of them. They’re the golden yellow kinds, probably sweetened by the time they’ve spent in the sun. When he smiles down at them, though Zayn wants to feel whatever possessed Harry, he only ends up feeling stupid. He’s smiling at grapes for fuck’s sake. God, but the man is weird.

Harry ends up buying the grapes on sale, a box of gluten free cookies and an alarming amount of bananas that Zayn is surprisingly happy to see, even if it’s less surprising, because he knows it’s what Harry lives off of in the hospital.

From there, wanting to, not being able to stop himself and just falling into step with him, Zayn follows Harry to a building, inside it and all the way to the top on another old, groaning elevator.

It’s not that Zayn never follows anyone. At one time or another they all do it, searching for that feeling of human beings around you, that pulse that’s a bit lighter to carry around than someone’s heartbeat. Zayn for one has never followed someone who’s heartbeat he’s already felt so clearly and also, he’s never followed someone who, as soon as getting into the apartment and putting the grocery bag on the floor, starts to literally shed, for lack of a better word.

Because Harry actually sheds. He kicks off his boots between steps and then layers of clothes start disappearing – his socks, jeans and sweater, the hole-y t-shirt underneath – like he’s been waiting his entire shift for exactly this moment. After getting down to his underwear, Harry ends up an exhausted, practically naked mess spread out on the couch. And quite perfectly too, Zayn takes the opportunity to finally look around where he’s standing.

Harry’s apartment is bare. Quaint. There are a few shirts and socks in different corners of the living room they’re both in, but otherwise, Zayn doesn’t know what to settle his eyes on, because there’s just nothing there. It’s just furniture. A dark brown couch. A TV in front of it mounted on the wall. Zayn can see into the bathroom and the kitchen on the other side of the hallway, but there’s just nothing that holds his attention. There are books on some shelves, a few CDs, a couple of records, but no player anywhere. There’s a lamp. A plant that might be plastic. A round gray rug the divider between the TV and the couch.

It turns out that Harry’s apartment in just as sad looking as Harry.

Harry gets up after a few minutes of just lying there and digs out the grapes out of the shopping bag and plops right back down on the couch. He digs the remote out from under his thigh and puts on a show Zayn's never seen before. There isn’t much reason to watch TV once you’ve died, Zayn’s found.

Harry watches the show for three hours. Three hours of biting into grapes messily and getting drips of it all down his chin and chest. It's only for a second that Zayn thinks about licking the sweet sweat off his skin, because as soon as he does, he rather focuses on the lamp in the corner. 

When Harry’s all out of the strawberries and another episode ends, he switches the TV off and closes his eyes. Zayn is half convinced that he's just going to sleep there, sweaty and all, with an empty plastic little crate still gripped in his hands. He doesn't though.

With a groan, Harry gets up and goes to the bathroom. Though he doesn't close his door and so gives Zayn a really rather perfect opportunity, Zayn moves to the windows and feels out the neighborhood, but besides the now familiar thump there's nothing important out there, nothing calling him closer.

And that's the thing that's keeping him where he is: the fact that he feels something. It's not the usual pull, nothing like it, because he can't tell how much time Harry has just from the sound of his heart. Zayn can't even narrow it down to a year, not to mention minutes. It's something else completely, some kind of interest or just plain old curiosity, because it's not like Zayn can put his finger on it, but he's felt it ever since the hospital and then when Harry was on the couch and now, while he's showering. A beat, like a song being played in the next room. A rhythm, like footsteps getting closer and closer. A melody playing in Zayn’s head.

Even when Harry gets into his bed and after the couple of hours it takes him to fall asleep, it's there, loud and clear and calling Zayn closer. Just as strong as he can feel Louis looking for him, Harry's there too. Or his heart is. Or both, it's too confusing to try and make sense of it, so in that moment, as he's standing in Harry's doorway, listening to him snore, Zayn decides he isn't going to. There’s no sense to it anyway, so Zayn’s not going to do anything.

Since Nick must've gone to sleep, because Louis is getting annoying wherever he is, shouting Zayn's name as if he doesn't know it gets loud enough to pop an eardrum, Zayn does decide to leave. For tonight. Because he also decides to come back tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that too.

Right before he leaves, Zayn chuckles with the realization that Harry smells sweet. Like sweet peaches and strawberries, like he bathes in sugar, as if Harry’s made a decision all on his own: if you can't beat them, join them.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

_Jayla – Hide and seek_

Her name is Jayla. The medic, who’s working the night shift and would probably rather be anywhere else than in Angels Memorial tonight, shouts it over the thrum of people rushing past them as he wheels her on the stretcher towards where Harry is waiting.

“Jayla Morganson. Hit and run,” he tells Harry. "BP is sixty over ninety, collapsed left lung, broken femur, crushed elbow," he keeps listing off, one injury after the other, making Zayn lose count after the first three. Harry keeps up though. He nods and flashes a light at her eyes.

"Unresponsive." It's like a jury, sentencing the accused. They’re innocent until proven guilty. Responsive until they’re not, because then they’re here, being flipped over to another bed and rolled onto center stage.

Zayn doesn't understand any of it. He's not a doctor. He isn’t good at biology or chemistry or knowing which medicine is good for what. All he knows is that although Jayla is being hooked up to machines and rolled over on the bed and then rolled to the center stage, he can feel her heart beating in the tips of his fingers, right under the nail beds. Zayn doesn't want to be poetic, but it's almost like she's reaching out for him, trying to grab hold of his hand. Or maybe it's the other way around and he's the one doing the reaching, the calling, the pulling.

If he could, he'd tell Harry to stop, that it's over, that it's done and it'll be a matter of three minutes and twenty-seven seconds before she'll be standing next to Zayn, asking for his name. But he knows how this part goes by now. It's not difficult to remember. Harry will do everything he can. He'll get an IV in her, push whatever medicine she needs to keep her heart going. They'll help her breathing too, try to keep her with them for as long as they can. Jayla will go with it, it will look like it's working for a few seconds, but not long enough for Harry to relax, because he's done this before too.

When her heart will give in for the first time, the nurse will rip off her top so Harry can shock her, and all the while, Zayn will keep wishing he didn't have to do that. Zayn will keep wishing that something they do will work, but it's going to be too late. Like it is most times these days.

After the third shock, Jayla nudges Zayn's elbow.

“What's going on?”

Zayn keeps his eyes on Harry. "He's trying to save you."

"Oh," she says with a breath as if it's the last one she has to give. They both watch the center stage, keep their eyes on her. "He isn't going to, is he?" she asks, once it’s clear that Harry’s losing steam, that he’s getting more and more worried, more and more hopeless.

It's not hard to say, "No, he isn't," but it hasn't gotten any easier since the first time either. Zayn may have lost count of how many years he’s been doing this, but he hasn't forgotten that.

"What's your name?"

He waits for Harry to take a step back from her bed, defibrillator still in his hands, to turn towards her with a careful smile. "I'm Zayn."

She nods and hums, says, "I'm J.J,” and offers Zayn a smile of her own.

The machine flatlines. Jayla's heart flatlines.

Harry checks the clock hanging on the wall above the beds, says, "Time of death, five forty-two."

"Can I ask you a question?" Zayn says once they're walking down the hallway, even though it's selfish and he's only doing it for himself and for Louis, because it makes them feel better, like they have some connection with the ones who were alive just moments before. Since it's the only way to keep a part of them here, on this side, he keeps asking.

"Sure."

"What are you going to miss? Out of everything, what was your favorite thing?"

Jayla smiles and looks over at him. Her eyes are wet, Zayn can tell. If he could cry, his would be too.

"My little sister," she says, right before they pass over and into the light.

That one, Zayn will keep to himself.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It's almost two weeks later that Zayn finds Harry sitting on the floor in the hallway, hidden by the shadows again, between one bed and another. His back is straight against the wall this time and instead of in his hands, his head is turned towards the ceiling. There's nothing there, Zayn looks too. Just a few water stains, some of the wall peeling away, a bit of the ceiling cracked open.

It's not hard to tell, even with his less than happy disposition, that the loses get to Harry, that he can feel them nearly as much as Zayn does, probably somewhere near his heart too. The difference between them is that Zayn doesn't have even the smallest of chances to save them. All he gets are the traces of the person, what's left of them in the end, what they leave behind, whereas Harry gets the whole person, all the flesh of them. It's the part that Zayn gets that's missing. The part that leaves to go to the otherside that’s needed most.

It's days like these, when the morning shift has barely started and Harry's had to change his scrubs twice already, that get to him the most, Zayn’s found. Losing two people in the first twenty minutes doesn't bode well for the rest of the day. Especially not in Harry's world of trauma and emergency.

Since there's not much he can do, nothing effective or tangible anyway, Zayn walks to the wall opposite Harry and sits down too. It's his favorite pastime these days, watching Harry. Watching him work, watching him unwind as soon as he steps into his apartment, following all the meals he misses – counting the bananas he actually eats and the ones he leaves on the counter once Moira turns around.

Zayn followed him to a house the other day. A small brown house with one flowering pot on the front porch, right next to an old, whimpering swing. Zayn didn't stand close enough to hear any of the conversation, rather keeping himself close to the opposite side of the street, but he watched Harry sit with an older woman on the swing. Zayn watched him hand over a metal tin of cookies. He watched them talk, eat, and then just sit there together, until Harry got up and hugged her, kissed both her cheeks and left. Then he followed a bit closer behind him, wondering who the woman was and if, unlike the rest of the people in his life, Harry visits her often.

Now, he watches Harry reach into his pocket and dial someone's number.

"Hey," Harry breathes out, his eyes on the ceiling again.

Without thinking too much about it, Zayn hears Nick on the other side of the call say, "Long time no hear, Harold."

"Listen–"

"It's fine," Nick cuts him off. Zayn pictures him waving his hand around. "I mean, it isn't, but I get it. It's fine."

There a pause where neither says anything and Zayn just keeps watching Harry. Then Harry closes his eyes and asks, "How are you?"

Nick laughs. "Crazier by the minute, the usual. Theo misses you. I miss you."

"I'll come by," Harry promises immediately, but it's a shy, tentative thing.

"Today?"

"Tomorrow."

Another pause, and then Nick says, "I'm keeping you to that."

"Do." Harry nods. "See you."

"See you tomorrow, Harold."

"Bye," Harry says and waits for the, "Bye, bye, bye, bye," on the other end to cut off before he puts his phone back into his pocket.

It's the strangest, most unsettling thing, but somehow, Zayn knows Harry will keep his word.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

They go to the park. Harry is still in his dark blue scrubs. Zayn knows his next shift starts in an hour and that's not nearly enough time – it feels like it’ll never be enough time – but it's probably the best he can do. The short break between is probably one of the reasons why Harry chose it in the first place. He couldn’t stay longer than that even if he wanted to.

Harry did stop in a toy store on his way to the park though, found one two streets away, so he could get Teddy something, anything, like a good godfather is supposed to.

Zayn couldn't help but laugh as he watched Harry debate with himself over getting a small football, a rubber duck or a tiny guitar. He groaned a bit, and then with an exasperated sigh, Harry settled on all three. Watching him carry the items to the register, Zayn wondered what it felt like, kicking around a football in a park or if he’d still like submerging himself into a hot bath on a cold day. It’s been so long, Zayn doesn’t remember if he liked it in the first place. He isn’t quite sure how a guitar is supposed to sounds like.

Small things, human things, slip away once you’ve been stuck in the in-between for as long as Zayn has.

Nick calls him an idiot five times, but Teddy’s running up and down the park, all around the bench they're sitting on, kicking his new ball and shrieking every time it gets away from him, so Harry really doesn't mind. Zayn can tell by the way he keeps smiling at Teddy.

Zayn’s never seen it before, how bright Harry’s smile is. How it shows his two big front teeth and crinkles his eyes up. Sometimes it’s with a small, barely there giggle that makes the thumping beat in Zayn’s chest speed up, and sometimes, it’s with this look in Harry’s eyes, like he’s both realizing everything he’s missing by not picking up his phone and thinking he wants to do this every day.

“I feel… I’m okay. I mean, of course I’m horrible and I swear I’ve gone crazy and everything is still awful and god, I miss him so much, but I’m okay too. I think," Nick says with a kind of finality, in one big gulp of air when Harry asks him how he's doing, how he’s been.

It's hard to hear, but knowing that when he isn't waiting in hospitals, Louis is always with Nick and Teddy makes it easier to know that it hasn't gotten any better yet for Nick. Harry doesn't know though, has no idea that Louis and Nick have a connection that wasn’t severed by Louis’ death, so his face does this thing, like he has to clench his teeth so he doesn't cry and is only half successful at it.

“Nick…” Harry chokes out and immediately slaps a hand over his mouth.

It’s probably the reason why Harry doesn’t pick up his phone when Nick is calling, Zayn realizes. Seeing how it’s all so recent for them both still, that it’s so fucking hard to remember all over again that Louis really is gone and they haven’t been imaging it, dreaming of it as their worst nightmare, Zayn understands why Harry keeps his distance.

Everyone started asking him how he was doing, like it makes it any easier to say he’s absolutely awful and that it will never, ever get better, because how could it? Zayn remembers Louis telling him about his Harry, that he was the most worried about him. Nick and Teddy have each other, he said, and they still had Louis, one way or another, but Harry, he was alone. That’s what Louis kept saying. He doesn’t have anyone, just that stupid hospital.

Looking at Nick shake his head and call Teddy closer while Harry stares at his fingers tangled in the bottom of his scrubs, makes it easier to understand that Harry thinks he doesn’t even have Nick. Louis said it must’ve been the most difficult thing in the world, calling time on your best friend, and though Zayn could understand it then, he gets to actually see it now.

No longer standing against a tree, Zayn comes to the bench and sits next to Harry, because all he wants to do is tell him that it wasn’t his fault, because something tells him that everyone forgot to remind Harry. Everyone asked him how he was and told him it gets better, but maybe no one’s told him that it wasn’t his fault.

“Let’s think happy thoughts instead, yeah?” Nick says as he picks Teddy up and plops him down in his lap. “Here,” he gives the boy a juicebox, all while not looking at Harry. “They changed my time on the radio, did I tell you?”

It takes a bit of time, but Harry manages to say a somewhat steady, “No.”

“Yeah,” Nick finally turns his head and looks over at Harry, gives him an encouraging smile. “I’ve got the mornings now, from eight to eleven, so this one,” he shakes Teddy up and down on his knees, “doesn’t have to stay in daycare for more than just a few hours now.”

“That’s…” Harry obviously has to swallow something painful first, but after a breath, he says, “That’s great,” and even tickles Teddy under his chin.

It’s lighter from there, so when Harry and Nick start talking about work and then move on to inspecting a mole that’s popped up on Teddy’s calf, Harry happily declaring it nothing more than a normal mole, Zayn wanders away a bit to give them their privacy.

The next time Nick and Harry meet on the same bench and Zayn gets to watch them again, he understands that it’s just the way these things go. First, Harry asks how Nick is and Nick gets a bit frantic with saying how great he is. Then Harry starts feeling guilty. And after they get passed that, they can start a normal flow of things. Or at least what normal is for them now.

It’s right before they’re about to leave that it gets worse again.

Louis suddenly appears right next to Nick and though it’s soundless for a change, Zayn nearly hears a burst of a pop. Nick, of course, goes completely straight and doesn’t move besides clearing his throat as loudly as he can, it seems.

Harry, on the other hand, doesn’t notice a thing: not Zayn, not Louis and not how Nick is side-eyeing the empty space next to him that isn’t nearly as empty as it seems. Harry is ruffling Teddy’s hair and making him promise not to play football inside the apartment. Though, no matter how many ‘I promise’ and ‘I swear’s come out of Teddy’s mouth, he’s still Louis’ son, so Harry must know it’s bound to happen sooner or later.

With a hug that doesn’t last long, but is tight enough that Zayn can almost feel it, Nick tells Harry to answer his phone next time and with that, walks away with Teddy holding his hand on his left and Louis on his other side.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Harry is trying to convince Moira to give him a shift over the weekend, “Just give me twelve hours somewhere,” and it’s coming out slightly pathetic, actually, but Zayn’s learned to laugh at things like these, because for one, it’s very Harry and Moira is not having it.

“No. I’m not giving you an hour. You’re not allowed near this damn hospital until Monday.”

“Moira–”

“Harry, I swear to god. I will call security.”

And she really would, Zayn thinks with another laugh. It’s really not funny, how Harry can’t seem to be able to spend a weekend away, by himself, nowhere near spilling blood and cracked bones and wailing teenagers who can’t believe jumping off roofs on a dare will do that to your knees. It’s not like Harry has a choice, though.

“Go. Go home.”

“I hope you know,” Harry starts with his voice low and his eyes set and he’s even got a finger pointed right at Moira, as if it adds to the threat. But she beats him to it and says, around a laugh, “Yeah, believe me, I hate you too. Now go. Bye. See you on Monday.”

“I’ll get you back for this!” Harry yells after her, but Moira just raises her hand in a wave and disappears behind the corner.

Harry, left alone and with nothing else to do, grumbles under his breath as he passes Zayn, something about, “how dare she,” and “stupid hospital,” but he still detours to get his scrubs from the locker along with a very brown banana.

Zayn watched Harry come to the hospital on a rusty old bike yesterday morning and now he watches him leave on it again. Standing on the roof of Angels Memorial, Zayn keeps his eyes on Harry as long as he can and doesn’t immediately follow him. It’s because he’s made a promise to himself to be less pathetic about this whole thing and actually do some work when he can. And now that he doesn’t have Harry distracting him and pulling him left and right, Zayn does.

He goes back to center stage and though there’s a couple of moments he thinks he hears Harry and isn’t even surprised he might already be back, it goes smoothly. Well, smoothly for Zayn. Less for other people involved.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It’s as the sun is setting that Louis finally shows up.

“The world is a cruel, cruel place,” is what he starts with as soon as he does. “It’s just cruel.”

Zayn’s known Louis for long enough now to not ask why. He hums, nods and takes another drag of his cigarette. And it’s always been interesting, the cigarette thing, Zayn thinks as Louis’ goes off on a tangent. Zayn can’t hear music and he doesn’t remember what apples taste like. Even if he eats one, there’s just nothing there except what he imagines the color white tastes like. Not even a lack of taste, just. Nothing. Cigarettes though, he can feel. First, the warm smoke on his tongue and then the gentle burn of it going down his throat, the smoke filling up his lungs and then not as hot, slipping back past his lips. It tastes like nothing, but there’s enough feeling there for him and Louis both to have developed a habit. Zayn gets to the end of his second cigarette before Louis ends his rant on a huff.

“You know?” he asks Zayn, looking for someone to wholeheartedly and heatedly agree with him. Zayn gives him exactly that. But as soon as he’s done saying all the yeses and exactlies, Louis then asks, “What’s wrong?” with such an immediate change of attitude, it’s almost scary.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Zayn says, confused by the question and by Louis picking up on it, both. Louis doesn’t look like he’s the most insightful when it comes to what other people are feeling, not with his loud voice and his all or nothing, right now or never attitude. So it’s no wonder Zayn forgets he was a psychologist before… Well, before.

“Yes there is,” Louis says, sure as anything, as he sits himself down next to Zayn. “And you can tell me yourself or I can pull it out of you,” he shrugs, “Your choice.”

Sure sounds like it, Zayn wants to say, but because it’s Louis and all they have is each other, which is another thing Zayn likes to forget most of the time, he says, “Fine. Okay.” And takes a moment to think about how to phrase it. Mostly, Zayn tries to think of a way to tell Louis about Harry without actually telling Louis about Harry.

He ends up with, “There’s someone I’ve been following around,” and then has to rush to say, “But not in a creepy, stalker-ish kind of way. He’s just… interesting, I guess.”

“You do know that that’s one of the first things you told me, right?” Like he’s decided to be the poster-boy for rational thought all of a sudden, Louis shakes his head. “You said to not get attached to them, the people out there, because they’re alive and we’re not.” Louis even motions to the city in front of them, spread out so far and wide it looks like it has no beginning or end.

Zayn almost says that Harry is different, that Louis would have to feel it to believe it, how his heart keeps beating right inside of Zayn as if it’s lost its place and wandered off, and now it’s stuck and doesn’t know how to get back. Zayn almost does, but he knows Louis would both yell at him and hit him over the head if he does. So instead, Zayn just looks at Louis and as slowly as he can manage, raises an eyebrow at him.

“Oh, shut up. It’s my husband and son, you bet your ass I’m going to spend as much time with them as possible. God, you’re annoying sometimes.”

Zayn doesn’t point out he hasn’t even said anything.

As Louis lies back on the platform of the first _O_ of the Hollywood sign, Zayn throws the pack of cigarettes right at his head.

“You’re annoying right now.”

“I’m not the one lusting after some poor guy who’s trying to live his life without having the grim reaper fucking follow him around, now, am I?”

“Aren’t you?”

“He’s my husband, Zayn, for fuck’s sake.”

Zayn shrugs and leaves it be. At least now Louis knows. Not that it’s Harry and not that Zayn still as no idea what’s happening or what it all means, but at least Louis knows the gist of it.

The gist of the gist of it.

After a moment where they both smoke a cigarette while looking down at their city, Zayn asks, “You going back to the hospital tonight?” even though he knows Louis isn’t.

“I’m going back home tonight. Lott has Teddy, so it’s just me and Nick,” he winks at Zayn.

“Ew, too much information.”

“Well, you asked,” Louis laughs. “You? Going back?”

Zayn manages to shrug and give all his guilt away.

“God. You know it’s pointless, right? You’ll just end up hurting yourself for no good reason.”

Zayn knows. That’s the thing. Zayn absolutely already knows this.

“You can do whatever you want,” Louis sighs, “I just want to spare your feelings and mine too, because I’m the one who’s going to have to listen to you when it all goes to shit.”

“At least we’ll have something new to talk about,” Zayn says and smiles as he flicks his cigarette. “Say hi to Nick for me.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

And with that, he’s gone.

Zayn wonders how long it’ll be. If one day he’ll stop hearing Harry’s heart. If maybe someday, he’ll get to talk to him, though that’s a bit too morbid to think about, even for someone like Zayn. Really, the longer Harry doesn’t know he exists, the better.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

When Zayn shows up in Harry’s apartment, in the corner of the kitchen so as to be polite and make as slow of an entrance as he can, he can immediately hear the shower is on and Harry’s hum to go with it.

It’s perfect, really, because Zayn’s developed another habit since he’s started following Harry here. In the moments when Harry is sleeping or showering like he is now, Zayn snoops around his apartment. Though it’s less snooping, because that just sounds weird and creepy, and more of getting an insight into who Harry is, what’s he like, what makes him tick, and Zayn only does it when Harry isn’t right there. It makes Zayn feel better about what he’s doing.

He’s read the backs of the books on the shelf next to Harry’s television and flipped through some medical journals without understanding a single word. Zayn’s even found some regular journals, small black or brown leather notebooks, some with pink and others with bright yellow fronts, with the paper going all frilly at the edges. He hasn’t read those, because Zayn insists he’s not being a creep, he isn’t. But he did look at those covers and read the scribbles that are scratched into the fabric.

 _Can I cry?_ was a whopper to read. _Let us love_ , _She didn’t need his heart_ and _One and only_ , all made Zayn feel varying degrees of confusion with an underlying feeling of something very close to sympathy. Most of them make him feel like crying. It’s those inscriptions that made Zayn second think flipping through those notebooks.

He’s also been looking closer to the apartment itself. There are three plans, all real because Zayn has checked: one big leafy one and two small cactuses on the dining table, one with a pink flower and one without. Though Harry doesn’t look like he could sustain another being in the apartment, the plants are all surprisingly green and shiny.

His kitchen is neat and there aren’t any appliances to be seen besides a juicer, which with how many smoothies Harry drinks throughout the time he spends here, isn’t all that surprising. Zayn’s seen Harry cook before though, quick meals that are all made in one pan, but still, it’s not like the kitchen is never used.

Zayn doesn’t even have that much to snoop through. There are a few records collected in a crate in the living room, but Zayn doesn’t recognize the artists and it’s not like he could hear them anyway, so he left them alone after the first time. There’s a lamp in the living room, tucked in a corner that Zayn suspects doesn’t work, but refuses to flip the switch to find out for himself.

He went through Harry’s closet the other week and was both absolutely astounded by how many blue, green and purple scrubs he found and that he found anything besides the blue, green and purple scrubs at all. There are shirts, a lot of them actually, in a rainbow of colors, bright, patterned and even silk, hanging right next to Harry’s nicely folded work clothes.

He’s looking at them again, wondering why Harry’s stopped wearing them, because he has yet to see him in anything other than the scrubs, when he stopped and why when he’s absolutely positive Harry must look so good in the bright yellow one, or the dark navy one, but especially the all black one.

Slipping the silky fabric over his fingers, it feels soft. It probably wrinkles easily. It’s smooth and shiny; maybe the sun shines off the material in just the right way to make it sparkle a little. It’s a beautiful piece of clothing and Zayn can’t, for the life of him, imagine what Harry would look like wearing it. It’s such a divergence from the monochromic hues of his scrubs that the closet looks like it’s been imported from a different, alternate universe, one where Harry lives outside of the hospital.

Zayn’s about to move on the next shirt, which is much, much more see-through and embroidered with some kind of red flowers when a gasp from behind makes him pause.

Or no, it doesn’t make him pause. It makes Zayn’s world whirl to a stop so fucking fast, he thinks he’s about to fall over. On his face. Through the floor and right onto the pavement how many floors down.

Zayn feels for the heart in his chest and it’s still very much there, still just as much as an anomaly as it’s always been. It’s not time. Harry should definitely not be gasping.

Zayn whips around and with his mouth open in something close to shock, except even more taken aback than that, stares at Harry, who is, unbelievably, staring right back at. As if he can see Zayn, as if Harry now knows what Zayn looks like, standing in front of his closet and touching his clothes. At least he’s looking at Zayn with his mouth as equally open. Agape. He’s probably as equally as shocked too. Harry might even be more shocked to see Zayn, a stranger, standing near his closet, touching his clothes.

It just… He can’t be able to see Zayn. This isn’t how it works.

Not to mention that Zayn’s never made this bad of a first impression before.

Right as he thinks he catches the beginning of a, “What–”, Zayn closes his eyes and disappears. He’s too busy wondering what the fuck just happened to even begin to think about what Harry must be going through. But he imagines Harry sure is going through something.

There’s only one single thing Zayn knows. One thing that Zayn would bet the remainder of his life on, and it’s that Harry is alive. Alive and well, at that. There’s not a whiff of death about him. Sure, Zayn can feel Harry’s heart, which is just about as erratic as it’s ever been, right in the middle his chest. He can hear it beating in his ears if he concentrates hard enough. Zayn can practically taste Harry’s heart. And yeah, sure, Harry smells like death itself, all sugary and sweet and teeth-rooting, but it’s more second-hand death that clings his clothes.

Still, Zayn knows with every fiber of his being, that Harry isn’t dying. Not even close to dying. Why then, did Harry see him? Because he did see him. He did. Zayn is nearly completely sure that the gasp and the wide eyes, the open, shocked O of Harry’s mouth was all due to seeing Zayn.

But since that’s impossible, because one and the other don’t go together no matter how much Zayn tries to understand it, make sense of it, he spends the rest of the night wondering if he’s going insane. Or, the other insanely bizarre option, if it’s him that’s getting closer to being alive.

Sure, it sounds absolutely crazy. Just as crazy as Harry being able to see him, though.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It takes Zayn an entire day to gather up enough courage to show his face again. When he walks into the ER, sticking closer to the walls than he has been recently, like a frightened ghost, Zayn’s particularly afraid of Harry catching sight of him again.

He’s wondered, of course he has, what it would be like to talk to someone alive again. To just sit down and talk about nothing, really, with someone who’s still so much alive it vibrates off them. Because that’s what Zayn feels; he sees joy as golden light and feels sadness as a heavy weight and life as a vibrating force that can’t sit still. Zayn feels it all. He sees it all. No one else sees him though. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s worked at least, until Harry came and turned it all upside down.

Zayn stands close to a corner, half hidden in the shadows, watching and observing from as far away as he can get. Harry is on center stage, trying to stop the bleeding on a man who will come looking for Zayn in a few minutes. And right before he does, Harry lifts his head to try and find a nurse, except, he finds Zayn with his eyes instead. It’s right away too, quick as anything, as if he felt Zayn hunching in the far left corner and his eyes on himself. There’s a chance that Harry’s become attuned to death after all the years he’s spent hanging around it.

The world crashes down again, except it’s much grander this time, with fireworks and explosions and everything, because Harry can definitely see him. There’s no doubt about it. His mouth does the surprised gaping thing again, which Zayn copies this time, feeling absurd and caught out, before he disappears again.

Because what’s left for him to do?

Zayn can’t come up to Harry, shake his hand and ask how it’s hanging, because the answer is it’s not. It’s not supposed to be hanging. It’s not supposed to be anything. Zayn is supposed to be dead and Harry is meant to be alive and they’re supposed to exist separately, each on their own plane. What is he left to do other than disappear, then? Go up to Harry and tell him it’s weird for him too? That they should both be worried, because it definitely shouldn’t be happening?

Zayn’s never been confrontational like that. So he disappears. The next few times, as soon as Harry catches him, he disappears into the hills, on top of the big O of the Hollywood sign and wonders if one of them is going mad. Mostly, he tries to figure out which one of them has gone mad.

Zayn smokes his cigarettes, avoids Louis and thinks wondrously that’s he hasn’t actually felt this alive in longer than he can remember.

He’s vibrating with it too. He can’t keep still.

When Zayn manages to settle, and it’s only after changing his routine that he manages, staying away from the center stage as much as he can while Harry’s pulling double shifts, he goes back. Except, this time he actually blends into the shadows. He makes sure Harry doesn’t see him, not in the hospital and not on the way back to his apartment either.

Staying behind enough feet and ducking behind corners like a low life criminal at best and a fucking weirdo at worst, Zayn follows Harry to his front door and then, making everything much worse, he waits, staring at Harry’s living room window until he sees the light turn on. And only then, and yes, it does make him feel better about himself, does he go up too.

He chooses to pop up into the kitchen, because that’s what feels the most normal right now. Zayn is used to showing up in Harry’s kitchen- And as luck would have it, because Harry is almost never in the kitchen, he isn’t there now either.

Standing stoically still and listening for something, anything that could tell him where Harry is and what he’s doing, Zayn hears the shower turn on and then the shower door thump close. Another second passes and he can feel Harry’s heart relaxing, slowing down, easing with the heat of the water.

It was weird then, but it’s very weird now, to walk around Harry’s apartment. It’s especially unusual for Zayn to know a place like he does this little one bedroom, feeling comfortable as he sees the worn couch and the bunch of bananas waiting on the coffee table. It’s strange, because Zayn’s pretty sure he knows Harry better than anyone else does.

Zayn knows Harry likes to take a shower as soon as he comes home. He knows Harry likes to snack on discounted fruit while he watches TV. Zayn knows Harry snores. Not especially loudly, but he does. And only after the couple of hours it takes for him to fall asleep. Harry’s a fitful sleeper. He tosses and turns. He doesn’t brush his teeth in the evening. Harry flosses in the mornings. He sleeps with his socks on.

Harry likes to talk to his TV.

There’s all these things that Zayn knows and doesn’t know what to do with.

He realizes he’s walked straight into Harry’s bedroom once he’s already there. There’s Harry’s bed up against the left wall, his closet up against the right and a window left slightly open straight ahead. It’s sparse. Obviously Harry doesn’t spend much time here. It’s obvious that he doesn’t like to spend time in his apartment, but maybe if he’d put a little effort into the place, put up a few picture frames or plants or shelves, candles even, it would feel more welcoming. Now it looks like a deserted apartment of a man who’s deserted himself.

Zayn’s decided, between all his disappearing acts and cigarette breaks on the big O, that confronting the situation – his hands shake just thinking about it – is the best way to go. Maybe confronting Harry in his apartment isn’t the best way, but now he’s here and decided and Zayn’s always been steadfast once he’s made up his mind. And his mind is made up.

Harry gasps again. Zayn nearly gasps too and he’s planned this. Well, planned isn’t really the right word. His plan, as of right now, has two steps. First, it was to come to Harry’s apartment. And the second is to not run away like he did last time. He’s tried to come up with step three, but it’s been difficult.

So, he manages not to gasp.

“Who– Who are you?” Harry stutters out as he backs away from the door and into the hallway.

They must make a right scene. If anyone else was in the apartment, it would seem as if Harry’s talking to his bed.

As it is, though, Zayn realizes it’s what always happens when he meets someone new. People look at him sideways, wondering and wanting to know but not always ready to ask who he is, though some do.

And he always says, “I’m Zayn,” because that’s the truth and the simplest answer. It’s hard for them to wrap their heads around anything else. It’s why he sticks to that now too. Simple. Keep it simple, he tells himself.

“You’ve been following me around,” Harry says, talking another step back until he’s pressed up against the wall. Zayn takes a step back too. He thinks it might calm Harry down. Or not calm. Zayn doesn’t know if he can actually calm him down.

It’s not a yes or no question, but Zayn takes it one, though it’s not that easy to answer. _No, technically, I’ve been practically pulled towards you by the beating of your heart,_ sounds a bit too manic and creepy. Though, _yes_ , doesn’t sound all that better. Instead of either, Zayn says, “I don’t want to follow you.” It’s sad, is the thing, seeing what Harry’s life is like, knowing everything he’s been through and how he chooses to overwork himself in some twisted hope to forget or to make amends or something. It’s not exactly fun.

“Why are you then? And what are you doing in my _apartment_? How did you even get in?”

Zayn shrugs, “The kitchen.”

By the way Harry’s eyes first go wide and then his browns pull together in a deep frown, that wasn’t the answer he was expecting.

“Are you–” Harry visibly swallows, “Are you going to hurt me?”

 _I have no idea_ , Zayn wants to say. Or, _not personally_. _I don’t do the hurting_ , he wants to explain. He’s just a messenger, really. Not even that.

“No,” he says. “I’m not going to do anything.”

“Then why are you– You were at the hospital.”

“I work there.”

Harry frowns again. “You do?”

“I work as an outside contractor,” he jokes, but it’s only funny if you know what that means. And Harry doesn’t, because that’s the third step of the plan, Zayn realizes. Telling Harry that Zayn isn’t so much alive as he’s the grim reaper stealing all his patients away.

“Why are you– Why are you _here_?”

“I wanted to tell you something.”

Harry takes a step forward then – Zayn takes a step back. “So you followed me to my apartment?”

“I didn’t follow you.”

“You just, what, knew where I lived?”

Zayn winces. “Fine, I guess I followed you here, yes.”

“Tell me. Tell me whatever you have to tell me and then get out.”

It’s not exactly how Zayn planned this going. He didn’t want to scare Harry, but he also didn’t want to make him mad.

Feeling backed into a corner, he says, “I’m dead,” just a little bit too loudly and seriously.

It comes out sounding flat and well, appropriate for what it is Zayn’s trying to tell him, but it has the effect of Harry backing himself up against the wall again, gasping, again.

“You’re what?”

In for a penny, Zayn says, “I’m dead. And you’re not supposed to be able to see me,” because he might as well get to the point and over with.

Opening his mouth, closing his mouth and opening it again, is all Harry seems to be able to do. Until his face clears and he looks Zayn dead in the eye.

“Look, pal, I don’t know who you are or what your problem is, but I’m not the kind of doctor you need. Now, I’m going to ask you to leave politely again,” Harry straightens up his shoulders, makes himself taller than he is, almost like he’s bracing for something, but his hands are shaking. His eyes are still so wide when he says, “Or I’m going to throw you out and call the police.”

Harry must be one of those people who don’t quite believe it when death has happens to them. Zayn can picture Harry shaking his head, and saying no, no, no over and over again. Maybe he’d ask Zayn for another day. He’d probably ask Zayn all kinds of questions that he wouldn’t know how to answer.

The thing is, they never have any answers.

Zayn doesn’t find out though, because he decides to give Harry what he wants and disappears again.

He really hoped it wouldn’t have to be like this.

Maybe Zayn needs to go about this differently.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Zayn doesn’t go about it any differently.

It’s just that since Harry can see him, Zayn can’t exactly follow him around without being noticed. Every time Zayn tries, Harry catches him, whether Zayn is standing in a corner, hiding behind a group of nurses or even standing in front of Harry’s building, he peeks around the curtain and sees Zayn standing there and watching him.

Being invisible is a big factor of being able to his job. That’s the biggest problem Zayn has.

Susan gets lost. That’s the first and last straw. When Harry is trying to do everything he can and Zayn has to stand at the other end of the emergency room so that he doesn’t spook him, Susan comes to stand at the end of her bed and immediately starts crying. It’s an experience. An experience no one is meant to go through alone for a reason.

Zayn tries to call her name, whisper yelling, “Susan, Susan,” and then properly calling out, “Susan!” to try and get her attention, but Zayn can’t, because she’s watching herself die. No one should have to do that without a hand to hold at least.

Harry keeps looking in Zayn’s direction through it all. While he’s ordering another CC of something or other and doing chest compressions, he’s looking over his shoulder at where Zayn is standing up against the wall, yelling out Susan’s name.

It’s only when Harry stops and looks at his wrist watch that Zayn clenches his teeth and decides to do what he has to do. What he’s still here for.

He takes a deep breath and puts one foot in front of the other until he’s standing next to Susan’s side, trying to completely ignore Harry.

“Hey, hey,” Zayn starts rubbing her back, holding his arm around her waist to keep her steady. “You’re alright. You’re alright.”

It takes a couple of minutes of Zayn’s calm words and Harry standing there, probably only seeing half of the picture while nurses start walking around him to start unhooking Susan from all the machines and clearing the area around her bed, for Susan to finally start breathing normally again.

As soon as she does, she asks, “Who are you? What– What’s going on?”

“I’m Zayn,” he says with a gentle, careful smile. “I think you’ve been in an accident.” All Zayn knows is Susan was driving to work when a semi blasted through the walls to the otherside of the motorway and mowed down cars like they were made of grass. One of them was Susan’s. “But it’s okay,” he goes on. When death is so sudden and unexpected, it’s a shock. People get confused, they don’t know where they are or what’s going on, so it’s up to them, to Zayn, to explain and get them calm enough to be able to leave themselves behind.

“I’m– Am I dead?” Susan asks, trepidation and disbelief clear in her voice. She starts shaking all over again, so Zayn goes to rub her back again.

“I’m sorry.” It’s more of an answer than an apology. When he says, “The doctors did everything they could,” Harry finally snaps back and stops just standing there, watching him. He takes a step forward, but Zayn, seeing what he’s about to do before he does it, raises his other hand to stop him. With his eyes on Harry, Zayn goes on, “I know it’s difficult to understand right now, I know, but we have to go.”

“Where?” Susan asks, but without answering, she turns to her left and sees exactly where she’s going.

It’s different for everyone. A different place for each person. Zayn only sees a warm, yellow light, something like the sunshine of a hot summer sunset, like walking into the dawn of a clear, crispy morning. That’s the only thing Zayn sees and from what Louis and him can figure out, it’s because it’s not their place to know. They haven’t seen their own places, they don’t know what’s waiting for them after all this is done.

Giving Harry another look that hopefully says to be quiet and to stay where he is, Zayn finds Susan’s hand and holds it as she starts walking them towards the light. She’s still shaking slightly, but something is pulling her closer, calling her name.

At least now, Zayn has a better idea of what it feels like to be pulled like that, because as they keep walking, he feels something tugging at that string that holds him and Harry together. With a glance back over his shoulder, he sees Harry walking away from Susan’s bed.

The pull only gets stronger.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Zayn finds Harry in the dark, dusty hallway. He’s standing this time, right against the bit of empty wall between one bed and the next.

Whether Harry hears him or feels him, Zayn doesn’t know, but when he comes to a stop in the middle of the hallway, Harry turns his head and sees him.

“Who are you?” he asks without pause. This time, it isn’t a confused, worried question of someone standing half naked in his bedroom only to find a stranger admiring his clothes. It’s a demand, really, and though Zayn’s never been confrontational, he’s also never responded well to demands either.

So he crosses his arms over his chest, raises his chin and says, “Zayn,” as plainly as he can.

“Listen, Zayn,” Harry pushes himself off the wall to come stand closer. It’s almost as if he’s gotten brave in the couple of days that Zayn’s been avoiding him, “I don’t know what it is you’re trying to do, but I’ve had enough. Tell me who you are and what you’re doing here, or I’m calling security.”

Zayn nods and thinks about what to say for only a few seconds. Harry is a doctor, which must mean he wants facts. Plain and simple, the hard to swallow truth, without coming up with metaphors of daisies and buckets, or calling himself grim names, Zayn says, “I’m dead.”

For Harry, it does take him a few moments to come up with something to say to that. In the ends, it’s, “Excuse me?”

“I’ve never had to do this before,” Zayn explains, both to Harry and himself. The chance to do this as smoothly as possibly has passed when Harry caught him in his bedroom, so really, Zayn thinks, it can’t go any worse than that, right? Now, he needs to crash-control the situation. “You’re alive, right?” Zayn says, but Harry doesn’t nod like he’s meant to. Still, Zayn goes on, “Well, I’m not. I’m dead. I died some time ago.”

Harry, ever the eloquent master of words, says, “ _Excuse_ me?” again, except with more feeling.

“What I’m trying to say is that I’m not alive.”

Harry snorts, “Oh yeah, of course you’re not, that makes perfect sense.”

“No, listen,” Zayn insists, practically pleading Harry to understand him. “I’m not alive. I’m like,” he waves his hand around, trying to illustrate as best as he can that, “I’m in between. Somewhere. Somewhere in the middle.”

There’s a heavy pause. Zayn watches Harry swallow thickly. And then disregarding everything Zayn’s said, Harry asks, “What does me being alive have anything to do with… this?”

It’s hopeless. Zayn didn’t expect Harry to go _Oh, okay, that’s totally fine_ , but a bigger attention span is something doctors should really have.

“Nothing. It has nothing– Or well. I’m not, you know, and you are, so we’re not really supposed to…”

“Interact,” Harry finishes for him. It sounds like they’re getting somewhere, finally, when Harry takes a sudden step back and says a threating, “Listen, I don’t know what you’re on, but I am calling security.”

Sighing, Zayn points out, “They’re not gonna be able to do anything. They can’t see me. No one can see me.”

Harry scoffs, actually scoffs and then, as quick as anything, walks to Zayn, past him and back into the ER. Feeling like he has to, Zayn follows after him.

The thing is, Zayn already knows what Harry’s doing. He’s not the first one to do it. It’s like Harry’s read the book _I don’t believe I’m dead_ and is now following the steps everyone does to see if Zayn’s lying to them even when they can see themselves lying dead on a hospital bed. At least Harry has some doubt to wiggle around in – he’s still very much alive, so there’s no proof of death to reference to. It’s what’s making Zayn’s point so hard to bring home. He hasn’t even mentioned the fact that he has zero idea _why_ Harry can see him and talk to him and maybe, possibly, even touch Zayn.

Walking up to the nurses’ station, Harry stops in front of Moira and clears his throat.

“Hey, I have to tell you something,” he says, quick and loud.

“Go on,” Moira says, but she doesn’t lift her head from the chart she’s writing in.

Zayn goes and leans against the counter next to where Harry is standing. This shouldn’t take long.

“I want to introduce you to someone actually.”

Moira raises her head. “Really? Who?”

Harry turns around and says, “Zayn,” while looking from him to Moira.

Nothing happens.

“Okay, where is this Zayn? Did you finally find yourself a boyfriend or something?” Moira laughs and shakes her head.

“No,” Harry frowns, still looking from her to Zayn. Feeling some sympathy for him, Zayn shrugs at him, hopes it conveys that he’s sorry he was telling the truth. Sometimes, he does wish it was all a hoax; one big, elaborate lie. “You can’t, um… You can’t see him?” Harry asks her tentatively, quiet all of a sudden.

“Who?” Moira frowns, “This Zayn boy?”

Harry nods.

“Why, is he a patient here or something?” She starts looking around at the beds, at the people sitting in the waiting room on the right. “Are you hiding him?”

Getting serious from one second to the next, Harry clears his throat again and hunches over the counter to get closer to Moira, so he can whisper, “Can you see anyone standing next to me?”

“She can’t see me,” Zayn offers, hoping it’ll help, but when Moira leans back to look at Harry and the space all around him before she shakes her head, frowning, it’s clear that Zayn definitely isn’t helping.

Standing up and going to grab Harry’s hand, she asks, “Can you see someone standing next to you?”

Harry quickly casts a glance at Zayn from the corner of his eye. Zayn shrugs again.

“I don’t know what’s going on either,” he admits quietly. When he does, Harry looks back at Moira and says, “I think I’m just really tired.”

“It’s catching up to you. You have to take a day off. A weekend off,” Moira says, squeezing her hand around Harry’s fingers. “You’ve been working yourself to death.”

Harry sags his head, but Zayn can see him nod.

“I’ll give you the whole weekend off, okay?”

Harry snorts. “I’ll hate you for it.”

“Well, tough luck. It’s not like you don’t already hate me.”

Harry smiles at her. He brings her hand to his lips and kisses the back of it. “I do.”

“I do too,” she says, and though it feels like he’s invisible again, Zayn can tell he’s making Harry’s hair stand up on his neck. He can feel it in his heart.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

When Zayn follows Harry to the changing room, Harry says, “I swear to god, if you’re fucking with me…” without turning around. It looks like Harry’s murmuring to his locker if anyone were to walk in and see him.

Zayn shakes his head. It would be a cruel joke to pull on someone.

“Why would I?” he says, because he’s never been cruel. It’s not by his choice that’s he’s stuck where he is, in between, not quite here but not there either. “I don’t even know you.”

Before Harry can turn around, Zayn disappears. Again.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“So what is this?” Harry raises his head and it’s almost like he’s begging Zayn to help him understand.

They’re in Harry’s living room.

After thinking about, Zayn didn’t want to wait another few days or a couple of weeks to approach Harry again, because that makes it seem as if Zayn is the one doing this or making it happen. Just like Harry, he didn’t ask for this, any of this really. Zayn has been doing what he has to for years now without ever asking questions or asking when he’s going to be done. _If_ he’s ever going to be done.

For someone who can’t keep track of time, Zayn feels like it’s been going on forever.

So he’s standing next to where Harry is sitting on his couch. Or, not next to, because when Zayn appeared in his apartment, calling out a careful, “Hello?” to announce his presence for the very first time since he’s been doing this – and again, it has been forever – Harry had pointed to a spot on his floor, said, “Stand there,” while he stood a few careful steps away.

When Zayn asked, “Are you ready to talk now?” Harry immediately sat down and said, “No.”

So. Harry’s going straight to the point now, which is more than perfectly okay.

“What is this? Why are you here?”

“You mean here as in your apartment, or here as in dead and talking to you?”

Harry coughed. “Either. Or both.”

“I don’t know. To the second one,” he shrugged, having literally less than zero ideas why Harry would be able to see and talk to him like is right now. “We’re not supposed to interact, like you put it, until you’re– ” That part, Zayn didn’t want to say out loud.

It’s just one of those things, like calling on bad luck, a jinx, counting the eggs before they’re even hatched. And there’s no wood to knock on either. But, by the way Harry’s eyes go all wide, he must realize what Zayn means.

“Does that mean…” Harry leans back into the back, like Zayn imagines anyone would getting that particular piece of news. People have done that, they do that all the time.

Slow and careful, Harry puts two of his fingers against his neck, right under his jaw and looks as if he’s counting something. Zayn realizes he’s checking his own pulse.

“As far as I know,” Zayn starts, to at least calm Harry down, “You’re still very much alive.”

“As far as _you_ know?”

“No, look, it’s not– God, this is difficult.”

A bit panicked, Harry says, “I would make it easier for you, but I don’t know what the fuck is going on.” He takes a deep breath and give a slow and steady exhale. “All signs right now, like you standing here in front of me, point to a tumor in my brain, which isn’t something that’s going to make me understand anything better.”

Not that he knows for sure, Zayn still says, “You don’t have a brain tumor.”

“Oh, you’re a doctor too?” Harry drags out as one of his eyebrows lifts up to the middle of his forehead. It’s not a bad look on him, the sarcasm. “I think I’d rather go have a CT and talk to an, oh I don’t know, neurosurgeon, who actually knows something about brain tumors and hallucinations.”

Zayn shakes his head. “You’re not hallucinating. I know that much.”

“Why then,” Harry stands up again, because he’s rearing for a fight, practically shouting at Zayn now, “am I seeing a dead guy in my apartment, who’s telling me he’s what? An angel of death or some crap? Can you explain that to me, because I don’t fucking understand.”

Zayn, because he’s had some practice, knows when anything he says will land on deaf ears. It’s similar to fight or flight – when someone doesn’t want to hear something, because it’s too shocking, too unbelievable, they will not hear it no matter how many times you tell them it.

Zayn also knows desperation when he sees it. Like right now, for instance, Harry looks like he’d rather find a tumor in his brain than know he’s talking to a dead guy. Zayn can relate, he can, but there’s not much he can do to change their situation, since he’s the dead guy in question.

So, instead of telling Harry that Louis is one of the in-betweeners as well and that if he wants, Zayn can call him over, like he maybe should, but definitely doesn’t want to, he nods at Harry and suggests getting his head checked.

For someone who refuses to understand the important bits, Harry’s quick to grab his keys and head back to the hospital.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

 _Kaitlyn_ _– Angel of Death (though Grim Reaper sounds cooler)_

“I better be seeing things, Styles,” is the first thing Moira says when she spots Harry walking into the ER.

“You and me both,” Harry murmurs, to which Zayn shakes his head and can’t help but laugh, because, really? When Harry raises his hands up and says, “I’m here as a patient,” it does nothing to displace Moira’s deep, frustrated frown.

“What do you mean, a patient?”

“Something isn’t right. I don’t know what it is,” Harry says in a quiet, conspiratorial voice, “I just know something isn’t right.”

Moira’s frown changes its tone. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m here for a CT scan.”

Her eyes widen. “What–? Because of that thing earlier?” She starts and then immediately grabs for Harry’s head, inspecting the top of it. “Did you have an accident? What happened?”

“Moira–”

“Are you sure it’s not just over-exhaustion and stress?”

“No, no,” Harry swats her off and checks with Zayn, as if to ask, _Is it? Is that what this is?_

Zayn shakes his head no. He’s otherwise focused on the beds around them, all occupied, some with heartbeats he thinks he could feel if he really tried, not that he does. Tonight he isn’t here to work. He’s here so that Harry will understand that seeing Zayn isn’t a medical anomaly at all. It’s an anomaly, it’s just not a medical one.

“Moira,” Harry finally says, in a voice he usually reserves when he’s standing on center stage, dealing out orders no one questions, because he’s Harry Styles, ER and trauma attending. When attending Harry Styles says someone needs a CT, they get wheeled up to third floor and get a CT.

Harry doesn’t need to say it twice now either.

The whole process goes a lot quicker than Zayn always imagined it did, but then the attending doesn’t wait in line, because he’s buddies with the radiologist and knows him by his first name. It’s just for Zayn in particular that the whole thing drags on and on and on. The only reason why, though, is because Harry, for one, is pretending like he isn’t there.

“So you have to change your clothes?” Zayn asks when Harry’s handed a hospital gown, the white with blue specks one. Zayn even waits and looks at him as Harry takes off his shirt and is undoing his belt, because he’s still waiting for an answer, when Harry coughs something very close to a, “Do you mind?”

Zayn gets momentary whiplash from how fast he turns around and closes his eyes.

When he hears a machine turn on and do something, he peeks over his shoulder only to see Harry already getting on the table attached to the big white tube-like CT. Zayn frowns, but he thinks it’s probably just that Harry didn’t hear him. Because why would Harry be ignoring him all of a sudden?

“How long does it usually take?” Zayn asks once Harry is rolled inside and the machine stops.

“It’s magnets right? Or is that the other thing you doctors use?”

“I’ve never actually seen one this close.” Though Zayn has, once or twice. When patients were critical and there wasn’t anything they could do without seeing what’s wrong first. That’s how he’s seen the ultrasound machine and the MRI. The inside of the operating room, too. And now the CT scan from a few feet away.

When Zayn asks, “Is it just scanning your brain? How does it work?” he thinks he hears Harry hum quietly. The response eases something in him that he didn’t even know was getting tenser with every question that went unanswered.

For a while, Zayn stands there and watches the machine do what it does in silence.

Once it’s done making all the noise and Harry is being rolled back out, so he’s able to get off the bed and stand up, Zayn asks, “Are you okay? Did it hurt?” because he still has no idea how it feels for a machine to do that. Whatever it does.

Harry looks at him with something very similar to annoyance, for no reason whatsoever, and turns to the doctor behind the glass. “You got it?”

He gets a thumbs up from Lucas and a, “Do you have to wait for the results or is it like an instant type-thing?” from Zayn.

“Right. That’s it.” Harry huffs, looking at Zayn again. “I’m going to the bathroom.” And just like that, he turns away again and stomps off.

Zayn looks at Moira quickly, who’s standing next to the guy on the other side of the glass, and sees she’s frowning down at the computer. With a frown of his own this time, Zayn goes looking for Harry.

Harry’s just checking that the bathroom’s empty when Zayn peeks past the door and then as soon as he steps inside, Harry is practically in his face, he gets so close. The finger he’s pointing at Zayn is almost touching his chest. Harry’s hand isn’t steady either – shaking, left and right and up and down, it looks like there’s something under his skin, making him jitter, and it’s not the fact he’s alive that’s doing it either.

Harry breathes out heavily, in one big puff of air and asks a surprisingly subdued, “Do you really think there’s nothing wrong with me?”

Zayn blinks, confused. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you, no,” feeling himself go tense too, what with Harry’s measured tone of voice.

Harry blinks back at him and for a moment, it looks like he’s good with that, finally. Like he’s going to accept that as fact and move on. Until he throws his hands up and starts pacing up and down the bathroom. “Of course there is! I wouldn’t be talking to you right now if there was nothing wrong. This,” he illustratively waves all around Zayn, “wouldn’t be happening otherwise.”

“All I can tell you is that you’re not dying,” Zayn says, as calmly as he can, because he’s never seen Harry like this. Not even when someone is crashing right in front of him.

“And how would you know that?” Harry practically accuses Zayn. “Why are you so fucking sure?”

“Because,” Zayn shrugs, feeling like he’s being pushed into a corner, but maybe that’s because he is. Literally. Harry can’t seem to stop pushing right into Harry’s space. “I can feel it. When someone is about to die, I know. I can tell you how much time they’ve got left. And I can’t tell you that. I don’t know how much time you have left.”

“So,” Harry cocks his head to the side, clearly unconvinced, “to you, that means I’ve got _some_ time left.”

“Months, years, decades. I just know it’s not going to happen now.”

Harry stares at Zayn for a moment, looks in the mirror in front of him the next and then is practically shouting out, “I’m fucking insane!”

Zayn huffs, “You might be, but at least you’re not dying,” under his breath, because he’s getting sick of all the constant doubting, and questions he can’t answer, but especially all the shouting. Before he can try to reason with Harry further, he’s already turning around and walking away, saying, “Come one then, let’s see why you’re here.”

If only the CT could give Zayn that answer.

Because a new doctor, someone Zayn may have seen but hasn’t remembered, says, “I don’t know what’s going on, but everything looks normal here,” with a pat on Harry’s back.

“So, no ominous shadows anywhere?” Harry’s nose is practically pressed against his scan. Zayn doesn’t even know what he’s looking at. It does look a bit like a brain, a gray picture of the different layers that make brains up. There’re lines in the middle, but from what the doctor said, they look normal.

“Styles, what’s going on?” The doctor, dr. M. Scotts, it says on his white robes. There’s this moment, when Harry looks at Zayn, as if he expects Zayn to say that sure, you can tell this nice doctor here that you can see a dead person to your left. It’s a measuring look too, going from his feet to the top of his head, but it passes quickly and then Harry’s looking at Mark again.

“I have no idea. I just thought… As long as everything’s fine.”

“It really is,” Mark shows to the CT. “If you need anything, come and see me next week and preferably not at two in the morning. We can have a chat, okay? Great.”

With a smile and another pat on Harry’s back, Mark is gone, leaving Moira alone in the room with Harry. And Zayn. She’s leaning against a desk with her arms crossed and her face an expression of barely contained fury.

“I swear, if you don’t tell me right now what’s going on, I’m going to kill you.”

“Is that a promise?” Harry tries, his voice steady and calm for a change. His eyes swerve to Zayn for a second, but Zayn isn’t amused either.

“Harry. Talk.”

“I just… God.” Harry huffs a big breath, runs a hand through his messy hair. He checks behind him as if hoping Zayn’s not there anymore, but he doesn’t have anywhere better to be. Or maybe he does, but he might as well stay right where he is, at the back of the room, waiting to see what Harry does next, because if he tells Moira, no matter how great she is, Zayn will be in a sea of trouble.

The thing is, he doesn’t know how this telling people works or who could actually do the punishing, if it came to him being punished, but someone _will_ turn up. Someone will descend or ascend or just appear out of thin fucking air and smite Zayn six ways down to wherever he should have been in the first place.

So, in the hopes that something actually goes right here, Zayn shakes his head at Harry. Barely, hopefully enough for Harry to see and understand, and then leaves everything else in Harry’s hands, who turns back to Moira and huffs again.

When Harry says, “I thought I saw Louis, okay?” Zayn’s breath hitches. “It freaked me out because, well, because he’s dead and I shouldn’t be seeing him in my apartment, should I?”

After a heavy silence, Moira’s tone changes at last, with the, “Harry,” that she breathes out.

“It’s alright, I just thought… But, I guess I don’t have a tumor, so it’s okay.”

“Of course you don’t, you idiot.” She stands up straight and walks to Harry, holds him by his shoulders as she says, “You don’t eat, don’t sleep, you keep working double and triple shifts. You’re exhausted. That’s what’s wrong with you.”

Harry hangs his head. “I know.”

Zayn feels like he’s intruding. This, he’s definitely not meant to be witness to.

“Do you? Because I told you not to come until Monday, yet lo and behold.”

“Moira.”

“Go home, Harry. Go home, sleep for two days and when you come back, we’ll talk about why it’s okay to think you saw your best friend.”

Harry cringes, but he nods.

“Good. Now go.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“So now you just keep following me around, is that is?” Harry asks as he pushes the door to his building open. Zayn slides in right behind him, frowning as he does.

“Actually, it’s more that I choose to follow you around. So.” _Because I can’t help myself_ , he doesn’t say. _Because you’re both the most fascinating and saddest thing in my life_. That just sounds pathetic.

“You just thought, ‘hey, let’s see what this guy does when he thinks he’s home alone’ and went with it?”

Well, when Harry puts it like that, it does make Zayn sound like the stalker creep he was desperately trying not to be. “You don’t really do much, you know?”

“That’s not the point!” Harry shouts as he unlocks his front door. It’s the first time Zayn’s going into the apartment this way. He’s never even seen this side of Harry’s door before. And Harry, for how loud he’s getting about Zayn following him around, protesting it every which way and calling it inappropriate – not that Zayn isn’t aware – waits for Zayn to come in before he closes the door.

“No, I just–” Zayn always gets stuck when he tries to explain this. “Like I said, this has never happened before. I’ve never felt someone like this if they weren’t dying.” It all sounds incredibly morbid, though it doesn’t seem to faze Harry.

“But I’m not,” Harry says, because it definitely doesn’t sound like he’s making a question. Zayn just has a hunch that he is.

So he agrees. “No, you’re not.” Zayn shakes his head just to really help it sink in finally. “And you’re not sick, either.”

“Okay,” Harry closes his eyes and breathes deeply again. “Let’s say I believe you, okay? Let’s say I’m not crazy, you’re really here, I’m not dying and all of it is true. I still don’t get why you’re following me around. You even followed me to work.”

Now this, Zayn thinks, is going to get awkward. “I work there too.”

“What?”

“At the hospital,” Zayn says while Harry takes off his boots. It’s both a shame and a relief Harry hasn’t taken the rest of his clothes of like he usually does. “I work as a… Well, I help people pass over.”

Harry looks at him, tilts his head sideways and frowns. They’re standing in his hallway. To Zayn’s left is the bathroom. Down the hallway and to the right is the bedroom. Straight through it’s the living room and the kitchen. There’s an umbrella in the corner of the walls right next to Zayn and he has no idea what the look on Harry’s face means.

“The people that die?” Harry asks quietly, “They, they–”

“They go from here to there, yes.”

“And where is there? Is it,” Harry swallows, “Is it heaven?”

Zayn shrugs, because the specifics aren’t exactly written in a manual, so all he knows is, “I don’t think so. It’s a different place for everyone, but from what I can tell, it’s always peaceful there.”

“Oh,” Harry says with a breath that escapes him. He starts frowning at the floor and gnawing at his bottom lip. Zayn wonders if he’s worried, thinking about all the people he’s seen die and the ones he couldn’t save, wondering if they’re off to a better place. Zayn wants to assure him they are, but he won’t, because he just isn’t sure.

When he raises his head, Harry asks, “If I can see you, do you think I can…” and let’s his question trail off slowly enough that it makes Zayn anxious.

“What?” Zayn takes a step back, because suddenly, Harry is walking towards him. Right at him and he looks like he wants to reach for Zayn and grab him. Harry’s bringing them closer than they’ve ever been before. “What are you doing?”

Harry reaches out his hand and gently, as if he’s scared the whole world will collapse with it, places it on the side of Zayn’s arm. “Maybe I can touch you too.”

And that, well. That’s not something Zayn has felt since he can’t even remember when, but then it has been a long time since someone alive has touched him.

Louis has been very touchy since the beginning and he’s always afraid the kids will wander off, so he makes sure to hold their hands tightly as they go, but they’re all dead; their touch too cold and shattered into fragments of what they used to be. Their hands are a solid presence in their own palms, but it’s a detached weight, frigid, there’s no real feeling there.

But Harry, Harry is alive. His fingers are warm and there’s a heart beating in his chest, faster and faster the longer his hand stays on Zayn. There’s a cross tattooed onto the back of his hand, between his thumb and forefinger. Maybe that’s why he asked about heaven. But Zayn doesn’t think about that for long, because the tingling vibration over his arm and spreading all over from there feels like he’s been living in the dark for too long. So long, he’s forgotten what early sunshine touching his skin cautiously, slowly, feels like, as if all around him, the constant, evergreen snow is finally melting away and all that’s left is a soft breeze of a summer evening.

“Fuck,” Zayn says against a shiver.

“What?” Harry takes a step back with the sound, and his hand goes with him as well. Gone, but even though the sun isn’t there anymore, Zayn thinks he can still feel its remnants, he’s warmed up from inside out.

“No one’s–” Zayn tries to say, but his tongue has been glued to the top of his mouth. Without taking his eyes away from Harry, because he can’t bring himself to, Zayn swallows and tries again. “People can’t touch me.”

Harry frowns. Zayn hates how it softens Harry’s face. “What do you mean?”

Zayn stares blankly at him. “I’m dead.”

Because Harry doesn’t say anything, Zayn says, “I’m dead,” again, this time with more feeling, but still caught in a daze of Harry’s touch. “People aren’t supposed to be able to touch me.” Not alive ones, he doesn’t ass. But then he doesn’t need to.

It dawns on Harry. With a reverent voice of someone who’s just realized the most crucial thing, he says, “You’re dead.”

For some reason, it hurts Zayn to hear it said like that. Like, of course, he’s dead. Of course. But maybe if Harry hadn’t said it like that, like of course Zayn’s dead, it wouldn’t be as obvious or a true.

The fact saying it himself doesn’t have that effect doesn’t go unnoticed for Zayn.

“What did you think I was?”

“I didn’t think about it.”

Some people have the luxury of not thinking about what a difference a pulse makes, but it’s the difference between being here or there. Of being followed or being the one doing the following. That’s what Zayn is. He leads people or at least what’s left of them in the end. He’s a leader. A pulseless, awake creature of the dead shadows, lurking and waiting to get you – that’s what he is.

“Aren’t you supposed to be this, amazing doctor?” Zayn’s voice has an edge to it, because he’s suddenly not in the mood to be near Harry. He’s _too_ alive all of a sudden.

Harry throws his hands out, with a, “I have zero experience with this kind of thing! Usually, when someone dies, they stay dead in my line of work!”

“They do in mine too.”

Harry seems to deflate with that. It’s for the better though. It means Zayn can leave and only spend half the time thinking about Harry he would’ve otherwise.

Without giving it much thought, he’s on the Hollywood sign when he next opens his eyes.

There’s a breeze and it is summer, but it feels like subtle nothingness on Zayn’s skin. It’s a wondrous thing; being able to at least imagine what it would feel like if he was still alive. At least Harry’s given him that.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

As soon as Harry walks through the swinging double doors in fresh dark blue scrubs, Moira is pointing at him and calling him over, with a, “Come on, let’s get this over with.” Seeing how readily Harry goes, he must be thinking the same thing.

As they go into the break room and close the door behind them, Zayn wonders if maybe he should stick to the center stage for a while longer and give them the privacy they probably want. He might as well do what he’s meant to be doing, anyway. The weekend has been greatly and sadly successful. With no one distracting him, Zayn has been focused and productive, in the only way he can be.

But then, just as he’s decided to stay right where he is and wait for Harry to come to him for once, he feels a heartbeat. It’s a measured thing at first, a calm _thump_ , _thump_ that starts to – slowly but surely – increase in speed and then, just as quickly, in intensity too. It’s a mad thing, a heart gone wild, right in Zayn’s chest. It’s that that makes him look at the break room door. It’s in his chest, not in his fingers. It’s just there, without telling him anything besides that Harry’s getting more and more agitated, nervous, or overwhelmed. If Zayn was in the room, then maybe he’d know which it is.

Mind made up, Zayn tries to appear right behind Harry, so that he could go unnoticed, but judging by how stiff Harry’s shoulders go from one second to the next, it’s a lost cause. All the same, Zayn decides to at least stay silent and just observe, because really, he’d been wondering what Moira would say about Harry’s sudden need for a brain scan.

Missing the beginning of the conversation, the first thing Zayn hears is Moira’s, “I know but it’s alright, you know? To miss him.”

Harry sighs down towards his crossed arms. “Yeah.”

“Really,” Moira insists, “You have to give yourself a break. And you have to _take_ a break.”

Harry looks well-rested for a change. His hair is shiny and his curls look a bit fluffy, actually. His scrubs are obviously clean and from standing so close, Zayn catches a whiff of fabric softener even. It’s sweet, like Harry, like his shampoo.

It’s Moira who looks haggard. Her scrubs are stained here and there, but then she has been working for a fair few hours by now probably. She looks about ready to collapse in a bed, in all honesty. Instead, she’s here, telling Harry that nothing bad would happen if he took a day off here and there.

“Please don’t make me take another weekend off. Please.”

“I’m not going to make you. Not if you take a day off.”

“Yes, deal.”

Moira smirks. “Two days a week.”

“What–”

“They don’t have to be consecutive. Monday and Thursday. Tuesday and Saturday. Just pick two days and don’t come to work. Also, you’re shifts are going to be shorter starting today.”

“You’re not serious.”

But Moira is nodding at him, at them, really, as she says, “Dead serious. Twenty-four hours at most and equally long breaks. And just so we’re clear, doing paperwork in the break room doesn’t count as a break.” She points a finger at Harry, just to really bring it home.

“You’re mean,” Harry grumbles, “and old.”

“I’m younger than you are,” Moira laughs, comes up to Harry to quickly kiss his cheek. “If you see something again–” she starts and holds onto Harry’s shoulders when he tries to interrupt, “or someone, you can always tell me, alright? What happened was a big mess. There’s a reason doctors can’t treat their family members.”

“He wasn’t family,” Harry whispers forcefully.

“As good as,” Moira’s quick to say. “Come on. You’re going to be okay. You have to be,” she adds, quietly, and goes to hug Harry tightly around his back.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“So this is how it’s going to be then? You’re going to be right behind me, everywhere I go?”

Harry chews his banana with a disgusting smacking sound, looking up at Zayn from where he’s sitting on the floor. They’re back in Harry’s hallway. It’s been six hours since Harry’s gone back to center stage. He hasn’t so much as looked at Zayn since they left the break room.

Zayn wants to tell him about the pull he feels, that it’s really more like being dragged around the hospital behind Harry, that it’s there, in Zayn’s chest no matter what they’re doing or where they are. Almost like magnets. Like the moon and the ocean, one pulling the other along.

“This is where I work,” is what Zayn actually says, because the whole magnets thing sounds far-fetched, insane and so incredibly desperate that Zayn has to bite his lip just to keep himself quiet about it. He’s pining. Zayn is pretty sure he’s pining.

Harry hums around another bite and doesn’t look all that pleased.

“We could just,” Zayn shrugs, “work here together. Or at least pretend like we do.”

“Do you want me to call you doctor Zayn, too?”

“If you want to,” Zayn chuckles. It’s only slightly unusual for him to laugh, but it’s never happened that he’s laughed at a joke made by someone still alive. After a moment of silence that passes between them, Zayn sobers. “People die here, so I have to be here too.”

Shaking his head almost as if he’d rather not understand, thank you, Harry asks, “What do you even do? I mean, how does it work?”

It’s probably more complicated than, “I make sure no one gets lost on their way,” but that’s all Zayn can come up with that isn’t too morbid for a Monday afternoon. He doesn’t want to go into too many details either, because he’s sure the more Harry knows, the less likely he is to want to keep talking to Zayn.

Harry, as always, isn’t quite satisfied. “On their way… there?” But he does look interested. After their weekend of silence, Zayn is enjoying the current attention. He’s also been enjoying having someone besides Louis to talk to.

“Yeah, I guess,” Zayn says, “I’ve obviously never been there, since I’m still here, sort of. But we call it the otherside.” _We being me and Louis_ , Zayn doesn’t say. There are a lot of things he doesn’t want to tell Harry. Like the fact that he’s still scared about not knowing what this thing he has with Harry is. Or how, or why. Zayn still has no idea why he can feel Harry’s heart and it’s more than a bit terrifying.

Finishing his banana, Harry says, “Sounds a bit cliché.”

“Yeah, well, if you have any better ideas, do share.”

Ignoring it completely, Harry asks, “So you just wait around here for someone to die?” because he must really want to understand. Zayn’s never had to explain though. It’s instinct that guided him at first and it was instinct guiding Louis. Sure, Zayn told Louis about the hospital and the sign in the hills. But the how and the why of their job were more or less understood by themselves, instinctually. “How many of you are there?”

“You’re making it sound like I want people to die.” It’s offensive, really. And it gives Zayn the chance to completely ignore Harry’s other question. “I don’t. I stand on the sidelines and see if you’re going to save them or not.” Because of the look on Harry’s face – he’s clearly offended – Zayn explains quickly, “It’s not like it’s up to you. Some people are bound to meet me before they come to the hospital. There are only a few where you actually come in to play and keep them here.”

“So I save some people?” The hopefulness in Harry’s voice is viscerally painful.

“Yes.”

With a nod, Harry stands up, grabs the banana peel and the empty water bottle, and says, “Follow me,” all decisive and in charge. It’s, well… It’s pretty hot. But before Zayn can linger on a lot of different ideas popping up in his mind, he’s already on Harry’s heels, wondering what’s going to happen next.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

What happens is a bit incredible, actually.

Harry tells Zayn to, “Stick close, just don’t get in my way.” Which is what Zayn’s always done.

Every time a patient is up on center stage, fighting for their lives right along Harry, who’s hooking them up to one machine after the other, Zayn stands right at the end of the bed, letting other people pass through him without so much as causing them to shiver.

When Harry’s checked everything and decided that the patient is either going to stay right where he is or that the fight might be over, he looks over at Zayn.

Zayn didn’t know what Harry wanted, at first, but it became clear when Harry started saying, “Stay with me,” while he kept looking at Zayn with something like a question in his eyes. Then, Zayn knew exactly what Harry was doing.

Harry is asking if it’s too late or not, if they still have a chance, if he can do something to keep them here. So Zayn starts nodding at first, encouraging Harry while staying silent on the sidelines. But then he realizes that he can say, “He’ll make it. It’s not even close to his time yet. He’ll be alright,” and that it puts all the air right into Harry’s sails.

There’s one in particular, Kaitlyn, who’s walking right on the line. Right as she’s wheeled into the ER, Zayn is next to her bed, trying to feel her heart as best as he can. It’s weak, but it’s there, a gentle presence in his fingertips, but it’s fleeting.

Zayn follows her bed and is met by Harry before they hit center stage.

“What’ve we got?” Harry asks and though the paramedic starts talking, Zayn cuts over him.

“Kaitlyn. She’s twenty-nine. Mother of two. She stopped breathing and then her heart stopped. There was something…” he concentrates. It’s hard to sift through their memories that try to bury him alive. It’s an unsettling weight of remembering and regretting and wishing things could’ve been different. “She’s been sick for a while, something like pneumonia except not. I don’t know, but she’s been sick for a few months.”

“Right,” Harry nods at the paramedic and then looks at Zayn. Grabbing hold of her bed, he and two nurses get Kaitlyn up on center stage and get to work.

After Harry’s ordered some tests on her, put a breathing tube right down to her lungs and did an ultrasound, Zayn tells him, “She’s not gone. Keep her here.”

“I’m trying,” he says under his breath, but Zayn is right next to him for this one.

He can see Kaitlyn playing with her kids, can feel how tired she’s been for these past few months and how much she just wanted to get better, so that they wouldn’t have to watch her lie there like she has been, too weak to play anymore. All she wants to do is play with them again. That’s all she wants.

Harry tries. He does everything he can for almost an hour just to keep her oxygen levels up where they should be. Calling a cardio specialist, they consider her heart to be the main problem, but that’s ruled out. So it has to be the lungs. The cardiologist and Harry both agree.

If Zayn was a doctor, maybe he’d be more help. All he can do, all he does is just stands there and listens to what orders Harry is giving while trying to make sense of them. It’s only because he’s spent so much time in the hospital already that he understands more than half of it.

When Kaitlyn is ready, Harry takes her to the OR himself. Zayn wants to follow him, but there’s someone else, Philip, who’s barely hanging on and he better be here when he goes, because from how Zayn’s fingers are pulsating with his heart, he doesn’t have long.

While he stands close at Philip's bed, Zayn sees Moira, asking the nurse who also worked on Kaitlyn and where Harry is. The look on her face when she tells her Harry’s gone up to the OR, is testament enough of how often Harry does that.

When Kaitlyn wakes up the next day, groggy but better, and with a diagnosis of some sort of autoimmune disease that wreaked havoc on her lungs, Harry and Zayn go visit her together.

Zayn stands at the door while Harry hovers in her room, checking and writing in her chart. She's still asleep, probably from all the medicine, Zayn guesses, and there are machines quietly whirring next to her, one of them following her heart in beeps and charting blue lines.

It’s the only thing telling Zayn how her heart is doing.

“How did you know what was wrong with her?" Harry asks in a half-whispered voice, careful not to wake Kaitlyn. He keeps his eyes on her as well. If Zayn didn't know any better, he'd say Harry looks like he's having a hard time believing his eyes.

So Zayn tries to put the feeling in words, starts with, "When I can first feel them, it's their heart telling me that something isn't right. Well, in most cases it's telling me that it's the end. But hers was… reaching out," because that's how it usually is at the beginning. Like a gentle pull. "And then I can see their last memories, their wishes and regrets. Kind of like a collection of the best and not so good moments of their lives. If I'm lucky," like he was with Kaitlyn, "They think of their last few moments. If I can piece it all together, I sometimes know what went wrong."

"It's always like that?"

Zayn shrugs. He looks away from Harry when he says, "It's usually different with kids."

Harry doesn't so much as nod. Everything's different with children.

"She was thinking about how she doesn't want to be sick anymore. She didn't know what was wrong with her."

"I thought it was her heart."

But it was her lungs. Zayn knows that much. She had a clot somewhere, obstructing blood flow bit by bit, until it really stuck there, nearly killing her.

"If it weren't for you…"

It's a sound of desperation and hopelessness. It doesn't sound right coming out of Harry's mouth. He's always so right, decisive, determined. Abrasive even, because he's so sure in himself. Now, Zayn can hear the doubt creeping in.

"Not all people are meant to be saved," Zayn says, because he's had to find that out the hard way, all by himself, with the people he loved most.

Though he’s pretty sure Harry knows what he’s talking about, he still asks, “What do you mean?”

“Once you try to save the people you love most and you only end up making everything worse, you realize that when the time comes, there's nothing you can do." Sometimes, Zayn is happy that memories have become such fleeting things in his mind, that he can't remember exactly what it was like, just that it was torture. "There's nothing you should do, even if you can."

And because Harry finally looks at him, as if he has a million questions on the tip of his tongue, Zayn pops back down to center stage, just to see if anyone needs him and when they don’t, he goes all the way to the hills onto the sign.

Zayn needs a cigarette.

Even if he could remember what it was like, he wouldn't actually want to.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

_Julius – “You’re not from around here, are you?”_

It’s two weeks later.

Time has been passing by the count of patients coming to the ER – only coming, not going. Zayn never notices the ones that get to leave. And he only pays attention to the ones that come in on a stretcher.

Harry tends not to follow the patients who need antibiotics or shallow sutures. He’ll tend to a few dizzy spells and check a broken hip, but those are usually sent up to orthopedics too quickly for Harry to get too invested.

It’s because Harry is the attending, so he races after the ones who can’t remember their names, the ones who’s vitals are plummeting faster than Harry can keep up with and the ones who only pit-stop in the ER, before they’re taken up to surgery. Those patients are the only ones Zayn can remember for the last fourteen days.

First, there's a sudden pull. It’s a feeling of unsettledness and it starts deep in the pit of Zayn’s stomach, like he shouldn’t be here, standing and waiting for them to come to him. It’s a pull, a desire to move, a need to do something. That’s what it starts with. Second, and he doesn’t even need to strain himself, Zayn hears a siren, loud and crushing almost with its repetitiveness, coming closer and closer. Then, the ER doors swing open with the force of the stretcher being pushed and as soon as both paramedics have their feet inside the shouting starts. And when the shouting starts, Zayn knows to get ready.

It’s always been like that. Zayn’s always followed behind the patients whose hearts are loud and strong in his fingers, reaching out to him, except now, he’s following behind Harry too.

Harry runs to the bed, his stethoscope already in his hands. "What do we have?"

"Julius. Seventy-three years old. Lung cancer. BP is 70 over 50, he’s barely breathing and we couldn’t find a pulse at first. It looks like he was lighting a cigarette when his tank exploded."

There’s an oxygen tank between Julius' legs. The plastic cord that runs from the tank is firmly set underneath his nostrils. He looks so pale, like he's been covered in ash while the burn scars in between are the still-fiery pieces of ember that hadn't been put out properly.

"I can't hear anything on the left side," Harry declares as he puts his stethoscope behind his neck. "Possible pneumothorax, we need an MRI STAT and someone call the burn unit."

The whirlwind of shouting continues as they pull Julius to center stage and Harry counts down so they can pull him onto the hospital bed. As soon as he’s on, Zayn comes closer to the bed, right to the edge of it, because although Harry is placing a central line, Zayn could've sworn…

And then there it is, the flatline that Zayn felt coming for the last couple of seconds. That’s the pull.

Harry whips his head towards the monitor, because there's nothing there, nothing but a single line, and then to Zayn, asking the question he always does.

It's been a few days, almost an entire week, since Zayn's had to shake his head so soon. And he doesn't think it's ever been this fast either. He's never felt a heart coming before so fast.

So Zayn shakes his head again, looking from Harry to Julius, and waits for Harry to nod back at him.

"We've got asystole," Harry says and before the next second is over, a nurse is giving compressions, trying to push Julius' heart back into a beat. "Push 1 cc of EPI."

When they do, Julius comes to stand next to Zayn. He has a bushy, gray mustache, covering most of his top lip. His hair is slicked back all neat and tidy. There are glasses in the pocket of his yellow shirt and he's got a cigarette tucked behind his ear. With a heavy cough, he says, "So this is it, huh?"

Zayn gives him a nod, but it's too hard to take his eyes away from Harry, who's taken over the compressions.

"Well then, are we going or what?"

Zayn nods again. Blinking he asks, "What are you going to miss the most?"

Julius gives a deep, voice-breaking laugh. "The fact I didn't even manage to do one last pull, son. Lit a match and it was over." He coughs again. "Just like that. They told me smoking was going to kill me, but I never thought this would be the way I go.”

When Zayn moves to turn around, taking a few steps back first, Harry watches him go, his head hanging the further away Zayn gets. It's a clear sign. Zayn has to go. Julius has to go. And Harry is still giving it everything he has.

Some of them they can save. But not all of them. Never all of them.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Later that evening, Zayn's standing in front of Harry's door. He doesn't feel comfortable just coming in anymore, showing up in the middle of the living room with nothing but a questioning, “Hello?” to announce his sudden presence. Harry might've also mentioned how it freaks him out. So Zayn knocks now. He knocks and waits. If Harry's in the shower, he waits longer.

A few seconds go by, but before Zayn can knock again, Harry's opening the door with a, "Hey, come in, I'm just cooking," which is bizarre by itself. The fact he's still wearing scrubs is another thing altogether.

"Why are you in your work clothes?" Zayn calls after him. He's not sure he wants an answer.

"I've run out of clothes."

"What?" Zayn comes into the kitchen to the sight of Harry standing over a pot of pasta, sitting sadly in water that is decidedly not boiling.

"All my shirts and sweats are dirty. I forgot to do a load yesterday."

"So you're…" But Harry obviously is. Zayn shakes his head and changes the subject, because, "I've never seen you cook before."

"You said I don't eat." It comes out brisk and annoyed. Though it's the truth, because Zayn did.

A few weeks ago, after another one of Harry's shifts that seemed to drag on forever and stretching over days and days, and after Moira had been chasing after him with another banana, Zayn said, "Why don't you ever want to eat?"

Apparently, without really meaning to, it had the desired effect.

“I just asked why.”

“Well, it sounded like an accusation.”

“I mean it was,” Zayn chuckles as he comes to stand closer to the counter. “You know the water is supposed to be boiling.”

"Oh, shut up, I know how to make pasta."

Looking at the opened jar of sauce that will apparently go on top of the hard, crunchy, uncooked pasta just as is, without so much as seeing a hot pan, Zayn doesn't think so. "Are you sure?"

"It's pasta! There's nothing to screw up!"

"You could actually cook it, for one."

"You don't even eat, I'm not gonna listen to you."

Which, well, point.

Harry has attacked back, right away, with, “Well, I don’t see you eating either.” The tension in his shoulders and his flared nostrils all unclenched when Zayn reminded him that dead people don’t, in fact, eat.

"Fine." Zayn crosses his arms over his chest and wonders if Harry will at least try a couple before he strains the entire pot. Can someone get sick from uncooked pasta? Zayn figures he's bound to find out tonight. "You never told me why, you know."

"Why what?" Harry says, stirring the pot of barely bubbling water.

"Why don't you eat when you work?"

The question, as anticipated, is met with silence. And it's one of those strong-headed, _I know better than you do_ , silences. They’re not unusual when it comes to Harry. Zayn's almost used to them by now, it's just that normally, they're directed towards Moira. And only when she’s trying to remind Harry to eat or sleep. It’s their thing, almost, like a pattern Zayn didn’t want to intrude on and only did exactly that by asking one single, innocent question.

Serves him right, in a way. He knows to not ask questions he doesn’t want to have answered. Though, when it comes to Harry, Zayn’s found he has a lot of questions and a bit of a desperate need to have the answers too.

"Because," Harry starts. Zayn can almost hear his teeth grinding. "I'm busy. I don't have time to take a break."

"Everyone else does."

"Everyone else isn't in charge of the ER."

"That's like a– an important position, right?"

Harry nods, poking at a single spaghetti. "I'm the first person that sees the patient. I’m the one who’s in charge. "

"After the paramedics," Zayn thinks out loud, because he's been at car accidents before, he's watched as buildings burned and people struggled for their breath in their own homes. There aren’t many doctors running around burning buildings.

"Yeah, after they keep them alive, I'm the first who tries to actually make them better. In simple terms," Harry adds. Yeah, Zayn understands this is a lesson for dummies. He's had to give a few to Harry, thank you very much.

"Aren't there a few doctors working the ER at the same time though?"

"There are," Harry says, but it's more reserved, more quiet. Zayn still hears though.

"So?"

"So, I'm still the one in charge. I'm the attending. It's different."

"You're young," Zayn says without thinking. When Harry frowns at him, he explains that, "I've been around for a long time and usually, ER attendings aren't so young."

"How old are _you_?" Harry asks, the master of deflecting as he is.

If there’s ever been a difficult question to answer, this is it... "Twenty-five."

Harry frowns again. "So you…"

"No,” is the answer to when he died. No, because, “I don't remember. When… I don't know anymore." It's almost like memories weren't made to be kept that long, Zayn thinks sourly. He wishes they didn’t have an expiry date.

Harry nods and says, "So you're not technically twenty-five."

"No," this time his voice is brisk, because it’s not something Zayn particularly likes thinking about – how much time he’s been here, how much time he’s lost or gained or both. "I'm not."

"How come you don't remember?"

"It doesn't work that way." Zayn doesn't think it does, at least. No one was here to tell him how things work after he died, even when he was hanging around nowhere in particular, like a sad, lonely, lost loser. Everything he knows now, he's found out from Bob, who found him sitting on the bench in front of Angels Memorial, feeling the pull but now knowing what to do with it.

Bob had only said to follow it. “When it calls you, go.”

And then he quickly after fucked off to Minnesota, “The land of a lot less fucking heat waves, I'll tell you that much.”

As if they can feel the heat.

There are the things he’s found out for himself, the things Louis helped him figure out, and that’s it. That's how much Zayn knows about being where he is, stuck between a rock and a hard place with just about the worst possible job someone could have.

"And I don't know how it works, before you ask."

Harry manages to pick at a spaghetti before the strains the lot of it and throws all of it, along with the sauce in a bowl. He motions for Zayn to follow, so they end up sitting on the couch, Harry eating his dinner while Zayn tries but fails to understand the point of the show on the television.

"I don't get it," he says after exactly ten minutes.

"It's a baking show."

"What's the point of it?"

Harry shrugs and slurps around his pasta. "They just bake."

Even Zayn's current existence could be explained better.

"Mmm," Harry sounds suddenly. "How many attendings have you seen?"

"I don't know," Zayn sinks further into the couch as he tries to think. "I remember three, but it's probably more."

"So," Harry's eyes swivel from left to right. "Margaret was chief for eleven years and Thatcher for twelve before her." He says it all as if it's supposed to mean something. But when Harry goes on with, "Twenty-five, add at least twenty-three, you're probably more than fifty years old."

Zayn's never thought of thinking about it that way. More than fifty. "I'm old, is that what you're trying to say?"

"Just trying to enlighten on your age, that's all," Harry says with a bit of sauce in the corner of his mouth and then, most surprisingly, with a smile as well. What looks like a genuine, bright smile that reaches his eyes as well and practically light them right up.

That, really, is the moment when Zayn thinks _fuck_ to himself. It’s the moment he realizes he is truly and properly fucked.

There's something to be said about an angel of death finding someone very much still alive, attractive. Though usually, to Zayn's credit, people in his line of work don't go sitting on couches and making small talk with the ones that are still alive. Finding love between themselves, as the only available option, isn't unheard of, but it is rare. It's rare to still feel like they used to, like they’re supposed to.

This right here, though, looking at Harry first smile and then blush while he tucks back into his food, is otherworldly.

For a moment, Zayn worries. There’s a thought that’s been stuck in his head for a while now. What if he’s stealing Harry’s life? What if, for him to feel what he does when he’s even as much as near Harry, Harry loses some of his life, some of that vibrating force all around him? It’s not like Zayn can help himself to stay away from Harry, but if that was the case, if he was actually killing him by being so close that their knees are practically touching, he’d leave and fight it. All the pulling and the magnetism and the beating in his chest – he’s run away from it all.

But there’s not a word that describes just how much Zayn doesn’t want to do that.

"You must've not had TV."

"What?" Zayn started paying attention to the baking show when Harry focused more on his food than on their conversation and even he must admit, it is a captivating display of both averageness and spectacular failure.

"When you were still alive. TVs probably weren't around."

"Couldn't tell you either way."

"Right," Harry nods and wipes at his mouth, putting the bowl on the coffee table. "You don't remember. Well, _this_ is a television, it–"

"I know what it is," Zayn grumbles, because he has seen a few of them before. "I've just never had the opportunity to sit down and watch something."

"So this is your first time?"

Zayn snorts. "Sure. Yeah. Though I do watch some of what’s playing around the hospital."

Harry stares at him blankly. “That’s so weird,” he says, looking more than slightly unsettled by the thought of Zayn sitting in an occupied hospital room and watching TV with a patient. On slow nights, there’s not much else to do, though. “I'm just saying you should watch something cult, you know. Now that you can.”

"Cult?" Zayn asks dubiously. How can a show be 'cult'?

"Yeah," Harry nods, clearly excited. "Wait, let me find something." He's grabbing the remote and then he's clicking away, pressing button after button and changing the pictures on the TV, making it flash even, before he settles on something with a loud, "Ah!"

"What's this?"

" _Friends_."

" _Friends_?"

"Yeah. You'll love it."

"Alright. Okay." Doubtful is what Zayn is, because the baking show was alright, but then it mustn't be cult or something. Zayn settles himself further on the couch, looks over at Harry, can't help but chuckle at the expression on his face, and then they watch the first episode with the runaway bride. After the second, third and fourth episodes, Zayn is absolutely sold on the group of silly, randy friends.

They watch a fair few episodes that night, Zayn more than Harry, because he stays awake through the night whereas Harry falls asleep quickly after ten.

For the next three days, Harry works, sleeps and eats right in the break room in Angels Memorial, like a complete hermit, Zayn tells him. He also reminds Harry that hiding from Moira isn’t a smart move.

“Pfft, she’ll never find me,” Harry says with a wave of his hand. He’s sitting around the table that’s next to the bed and he has the small lamp on, so he can see what he’s writing in patient’s charts. He looks so small doing it, hunched over the desk and squinting in the low light, that Zayn stays there, sitting on the edge of the bed, just watching Harry, in silence.

He keeps thinking, another minute, and I’ll leave. Zayn doesn’t though. He stays long enough for Harry to finish and then to talk as Harry settles into bed and Zayn takes his previous spot on the chair.

They talk until Harry falls asleep. Even after, Zayn still doesn’t leave the break room.

As soon as Harry’s back in his apartment – Moira finds him and throws him out of the hospital, Zayn cackling behind Harry as he stomps away from her – they both settle on the couch and watch _Friends_.

Harry laughs and so does Zayn, though he's more busy with watching Harry laugh in those moments than anything else.

After a week of Harry falling asleep on couches no matter where he is, Zayn asks him if he has trouble sleeping.

"Do I look like I have trouble sleeping?" Harry rumbles in the morning, massaging the back of his neck as he tries to move it here and there.

"You look like you have a stiff neck."

"Ha ha. And no,” Harry says dismissively, “I don't have any problems with sleeping."

While Harry disappears into the bathroom and Zayn stays leaning against the hallway wall, he says, "Because when I first started following you around," and tries not to cringe, "it looked like you didn't sleep much."

"I slept fine," is what Harry must say if Zayn understood him correctly, because by the sound of it, he has his mouth full of toothpaste.

"Sure,” Zayn nods to the wall and roll his eyes. Harry can’t see him, so it’s fine, “Except you didn't."

There's the sound of water running and then a harsh, "How are you going to judge me, you don't even sleep."

"Then I should know what not sleeping looks like," Zayn says after Harry, because he disappears into his bedroom. When he emerges, dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt, Zayn adds, "And I know you don't fall asleep easily."

Harry pffs at him. Zayn hates when he does it. "You're starting to sound like Moira."

Because Zayn knows it's not a compliment, he says an offended, "I've seen you staring at the ceiling for hours. I don't think Moira's seen that, has she?"

"Probably because she hasn't broken into my apartment and _watched me sleep_."

Zayn reels back and completely ignores the fact he’s now told Harry that he has, in fact, watched him sleep. “I wasn't breaking in.”

"Well you sure weren't invited, were you?"

They're standing opposite each other. Harry has his hands in fists. Zayn can feel his heart speeding up. This isn't exactly what he was going for when he started asking questions.

They’ve been asking each other questions, that’s what they’ve been doing for weeks and weeks now. Though, admittedly, Harry usually asks about death and Zayn wants to know more about life, because he’s forgotten what his own had felt like.

But at the end of the day, Harry probably never imagined this could have happen to him in the first place, talking to a dead ghost of the past, who’s never seen _Friends_ before, so, as if the last few weeks haven’t happened, he says, “I’m still not sure that this,” he motions between them, “Isn’t a symptom of something.”

It’s like Harry knows it’ll hurt Zayn to hear that and even if, he still says it. The thing about Harry is that he might be a doctor, he might save people’s live on a daily, hourly basis some times, but he’s still a bitter old man inside, with more problems than Zayn can count.

“I thought the CT was clear?” Zayn says, not exactly bored, but not wanting to talk about this again either.

“It could be schizophrenia. I could have a case of later onset Parkinson’s. Fuck, it could be epilepsy or a fucking tumor that the CT didn’t pick up on,” Harry waves his hands around, maybe to show how many different things could still be wrong with him. “There’s about ten different things that could be that cause of – the cause of you.”

“Or you know, maybe what I’ve been telling you is the truth.”

If Harry was able to kill him with his look, he would’ve. “I’m a doctor,” he says with feeling, “I need evidence. When I get a patient, I check their vitals, check their blood, and if a patient was telling me about an Angel of Death standing behind their shoulder, you can bet I wouldn’t write it off as ‘normal’.”

“I’m not saying this is normal,” Zayn explains again, because it feels like he has to keep reminding Harry, over and over again, that what’s happening is so far from normal, Zayn can’t even begin to understand it. “You’re not supposed to see me. I’m not supposed to feel your heart. I’ve told you that.”

“God, you keep saying that,” Harry pushes his hair back from his face. It’s long enough to barely reach his eyebrows and as he keeps running his hands through it, it gets messier and messier, until it’s a tangle of curls on top of his head. “But none of that makes any sense, because _of course_ I’m not supposed to see you! You’re dead!”

That hurts. It’s a fact and it’s true, Zayn’s been dead for a long, long time now. But it still hasn’t lost the sting. “I know,” he says through his teeth.

“How, pray tell, do you even exist. I mean–” Harry huffs around his next breath. His eyes have gone a bit wild, a bit wet. “This can’t be happening. Understand that. This cannot be real.”

“Fine. Then it isn’t,” Zayn tells him as calmly as he can. Now he even sounds dead. “Then I’m not here and you can’t see me. Fine.”

“Clearly,” Harry enunciates angrily, “I can fucking see you. It’s the _why_ that’s doing my head in.”

“Well, I don’t have the answers, Harry,” Zayn tries not to raise his voice, but it’s getting seriously difficult to keep any control over his voice. He knows he already can’t stop his hands from shaking. “What do you want me to do to convince you? What will finally be enough?”

“I don’t know,” Harry shouts first, right at Zayn, in his face. “I don’t fucking know.”

When Zayn doesn’t say or do anything, he says again, “I don’t know,” in a barely heard whisper that sounds eerily like defeat.

The only reason Zayn says, “Would talking to Louis convince you?” is because he thinks it might make Harry see that there’s more to it than just Zayn following him around.

Having worked with him in the ER, Zayn thought Harry was able to see, to understand, that it isn’t just about seeing Zayn. It’s about Zayn feeling hearts and leading people to the otherside. That’s the main point, the reason why Zayn is where he is – the fact Harry can see him is just a twisted bonus. It’s an extra, an addition. It’s not all about Harry.

“What did you say?”

Zayn sighs. So it wasn’t the best decision after all, to mention Louis, at least not by how Harry’s frown twists quickly into anger and disbelief.

“Louis is like me,” Zayn just says it. Just like that. “He’s here too.”

Harry whips around, looking all over his apartment, but especially in all the corners. “Where?” he demands.

“Not– not _here_ here. Just, stuck here. In between,” Zayn explains calmly. A few more seconds and Harry will start really panicking.

“How can he– No. _No_.”

“Harry,” Zayn tries to step closer to him, but Harry backs away from him.

“No, stop. Go away.” Harry turns away from him. He’s hunched over himself, trying to catch his breath. He’s probably trying to unhear Zayn.

But there’s no unhearing, not when Zayn’s concerned. There’s no bargaining for extra days and second chances, because Zayn is the end of the line. There’s only one way to go he shows up and though he understands why some people would want to talk their way out of death, he can’t do anything about it. He’d like to, but he can’t.

So instead of listening to Harry, Zayn says, “Louis asked to look after you. I was just meant to keep an eye on you when I’m here, because he said you stopped taking care of yourself after what happened to him. But I knew you from before.” Taking a deep breath before he says, “I was there when Louis died,” still doesn’t make it any easier to actually say it.

It probably doesn’t make it easier for Harry to hear it either.

When Harry doesn’t so much as shake his head, Zayn turns around and leaves. He hopes Harry will calm down enough to hear him out.

Having Harry in his life, having him there and spending time with him, time that goes on forever and ever, has been such a pleasant change from how Zayn’s days usually looked, that Zayn isn’t ready to lose him yet.

Not to mention that Zayn isn’t ready to lose Harry, either, not just his company. He doesn’t want to lose him in general, as a person, a friend – as Harry.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The next day, while walking the hallways of the hospital and trying his best to concentrate on anything else besides the pull he feels in his chest that’s trying to rail him in, Zayn inevitably walks right into Harry. It’s between the nurses’ station and the break room.

Harry looks around himself, sees a doctor and a nurse talking to their right, but deems them both far away to be able to say, “Leave me alone.”

“I’m not here for you.”

“Then just… Stay away from me.”

“Believe me,” Zayn sighs, wishing he didn’t have to, “I’m trying.”

Harry’s nostrils flare and it looks like he wants to say something else, but he shakes himself out of it and walks to the break room instead.

While he does it, he bumps Zayn’s shoulder. Hard.

It’s ironic, that while trying to convince himself that Zayn isn’t real, isn’t actually there, Harry avoid him and touches him, even so that it hurts a little.

It’s ironic and incredibly maddening to Zayn.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“You know _I’m_ not doing anything, right?”

Zayn is walking right after Harry, trying to get some reaction out of him that isn’t an angry huff or stubborn silence.

“I work here too,” he says, like he has more than a few times in the past couple of days.

“You could stop ignoring me, you know!” Zayn calls after Harry, even though he never does when they’re both standing around the bed of a dying patient.

Zayn will still tell him, “He’s going to be fine, you’re doing a good job,” or on the downside, “She’s not going to make it. I have to take her.”

And Harry still listens then, but it’s talking to Harry about what his favorite song is that Zayn misses most, listening to the description and trying to understand what the lyrics mean to Harry, that Zayn wishes he could get back. All of it, catching a whiff of Harry’s shampoo, being able to knock his elbow against Harry’s and actually feel it, watching _Friends_ together until eventually, Harry would dose off with his head on Zayn’s shoulder – those are the things Zayn misses most.

Harry’s smile. His cackling laughs. Questions like, “Does it hurt? When you die?”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It’s four days later that Harry knocks on Nick’s door.

As he did when Louis was still alive, Nick lives on the first floor of an old town-house. First, Nick couldn’t make himself leave, because even if Louis was still embedded into every nook and cranny of their house, his socks in the drawer and his toothbrush in the cup, it was theirs then and it’s still theirs now. Now that Louis is halfway here and halfway there.

Teddy is running around the backyard, unable to stop playing with the football Harry got him all that time ago. But that’s fine. While Nick goes to answer the door, Louis and Zayn look after little Teddy. Less lucky than Nick, but not really, Teddy can’t see his dad anymore. It’s just Nick who has to live with the fortune fucking misery of being able to still see his dead husband. Sometimes, he can get into a right mood about it. It’s understandable though, of course it is.

Louis and Zayn don’t understand how Nick can see Louis. This whole afterlife has always been a clusterfuck of confusion, but at least they’ve told themselves it’s because Nick and Louis love each other so much. It’s the only possible answer.

Zayn doesn’t love Harry though, and Harry definitely doesn’t love Zayn.

And Louis still didn’t know, well, anything. Zayn hadn’t been able to tell him anything. Smoking cigarettes on the Hollywood sign for weeks, Zayn hadn’t told him anything and felt guilty about it with every drag he pulled.

He broke two days ago.

When Louis found Zayn on the first big O, lying on his back and staring and the clear blue sky, he had kicked at Zayn’s thigh and asked if anything was wrong. Zayn had contemplated telling him about Dorian, how he’s been pulling at Zayn for days now but never quite hard enough to actually need him, trying to fight against what was inevitable sooner or later. It was exhausting, having to feel someone battle for their life.

Instead, Zayn had said, “Harry can see me,” just like that. And Louis had collapsed into a heap next to Zayn, just like that.

“What do you mean, Harry can see you?” Louis’ voice trembled. His hands were shaking.

“I don’t know why,” Zayn was quick to add, “He’s not dying. He can just… He can see me.”

“So he’s not–” Louis chocked, groaning and falling onto his back too. “God, Zayn, you fucker.”

“I should have led with that, shouldn’t I?”

“You think?” Louis punched his shoulder. Zayn was just glad they were lying down, so it didn’t hurt that much. “Alright, give me a smoke and tell me what you mean.”

And Zayn had. He said, “I don’t know what’s happening,” and then, “We’ve been talking,” without saying for how long. “He’s a stubborn ass,” and also, “He thinks he’s sick. He won’t talk to me anymore.”

“So he’s like Nick then,” Louis laughed. Because Nick thought he was dying too, when Louis first made an appearance. Or well, at first, in those two days, he hadn’t left his bedroom and forbade Louis from leaving too. All Nick wanted to do was lie together with Louis.

And so they did.

It was only after that Nick went to therapy and countless doctor visits.

It’s probably one of the reasons why people who are still alive shouldn’t be able to see them. It’s too difficult for them to wrap their heads around all the death that comes with being an Angel of Death, as Harry’s put it.

This was Louis’ idea.

When Zayn had asked what he could do to convince Harry that he wasn’t sick or crazy – basically asking Louis what the magic words were – Louis had smirked mischievously, with a glint in his eye, and though Zayn had groaned, he knew that whatever Louis was thinking of, it’d work.

He was Harry’s best friend, before. He knew him best. Probably still does.

So when Harry comes to the backyard, walking after Nick, with wide eyes and looking all around, past Teddy and Zayn and not being quite satisfied with that he sees, Zayn can tell, it creates a sliver of doubt in his mind.

If Harry doesn’t believe Zayn, then how is he going to believe Louis, who he can’t even see.

Nick walks over straight to where Louis is sitting on the floor and gets down next to him, hand on Louis knee and everything. From Harry’s perspective, it looks like Nick’s hand is hanging midair, connected to nothing in particular.

Because of who they are and what they’re doing, it’s a twisted thing to remember who can see who. Zayn and Louis can, thankfully, see everyone. Nick can’t see Zayn and Harry can’t see Louis. Out of all of them, it’s probably the hardest for Harry to not be able to see Louis.

Zayn wonders if Harry would trace him in, if anyone asked. _Would you be willing to never see Zayn again if you can talk to Louis for five minutes?_ they would ask and Harry would jump.

When Harry stops in his tracks right between where Nick and Louis are sitting and where Zayn is perched on the end of the lounge chair, Nick clears his throat and begins with, “Welcome everyone, we’re gathered here today to freak Harry out and make him run away as fast as he can. Alright. Is everyone ready? Zayn?”

“Calm down,” Louis warns Nick, because this is some type of paradox they must be living in too apparently. “Take it easy on him.”

“He can’t hear you,” Zayn so helpfully tells his boots, because he’s having a hard time looking at Harry’s twisted face of absolute confusion. “Louis’ here too,” he adds for Harry, because no one is telling him anything and that’s exactly what they’re here for. To tell Harry everything so that maybe, just maybe, they can convince him that what’s happening is absolutely normal.

Zayn can’t help but roll his eyes at the thought.

Harry frowns. “What do you mean Lou’s here too?”

Trying not to focus too much on how wrecked Harry’s voice sounds, Zayn explains, “I told you. Louis’ like me and well, Nick is a bit like you.”

“Nick?” Harry asks, on the edge of holding it together, probably.

With a great big sigh, Nick starts, “It started a few days after he died.” He looks at Louis then and Zayn notices how his fingers squeeze around his knee. “I couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t get out of bed at all, actually. And then he just, popped up. Scared the living shit out of me,” he laughs, now that it’s been a couple years. “That’s when I was at the doctor’s all the time. I thought I’d gone insane.”

“But you didn’t,” Louis says all proud and happy. He bumps their shoulders together. It looks like Nick’s getting knocked over by nothing but air. “Just like I told you.”

“Nick didn’t believe it either,” Zayn continues, because those two are impossible sometimes. “But as time went by…” he leaves it just like that, because as time went by, nothing else happened. No brain bleeds, no tumors, nothing, so it was hard to believe anything else. Zayn had hoped Harry could’ve skipped the middle part, but probably not many people can.

“So you can–?” Harry asks, but doesn’t seem to be able to finish his question.

Nick still says a very clear, “Yes,” though.

“And Louis’ is–”

Louis says, “Right here,” and then Zayn and Nick say, “Right there,” because they remember they have to.

“Oh god.”

“It’s not that hard to get your head around it.”

“How is it not?! You’re just saying that someone who has died is sitting next to you!”

“Well yeah,” Nick shrugs. “Because he is.”

“Don’t try to complicate it,” Louis tells Harry and it would be great advice, if Harry could hear it.

“Nick has something for you,” Zayn tells Harry, because he’d rather get this over with sooner than later. The look on Harry’s face is just getting harder and harder to understand. Louis bumps Nick’s shoulder again and points at Nick’s knee.

“Oh, right, right. Here, this is for you.”

Still frowning, Harry takes the wrapped box. “What is it?”

“It’s from Lou. He got it as a birthday present for you, but never got around to giving it to you, because, you know,” Nick shrugs at the end, like it was his fault.

While Harry stares at the gift wrapped box, Louis kisses Nick’s cheek and Zayn tries his hardest to keep his breathing even. Everything would be so much easier if only Harry could go with the flow better. Or, if none of this was happening in the first place.

Zayn can’t wrap his head around it, so he can’t even begin to understand what Harry’s going through.

“And this is supposed to be…”

Nick and Louis only look at him, because it’s Zayn’s turn now.

He clears his throat awkwardly – it’s too dry and he can barely swallow at this point. He can’t believe that out of all the things he can’t have anymore, like the taste of a perfectly ripe apple or the feel of someone else’s touch, the sound of music, he can still get choked up. “They’re rings,” he says, when he’s able to, as slowly and with as much patience as he can. “Louis told me that maybe, if you found out from me that you’d believe it. In all of this…” Or maybe he still won’t, Zayn had insisted, because they’re just rings. What can two gold plated rings do?

But Louis told him to say something else too. “Louis said, he told me, that he got you your initials, because well, you know,” he waves a hand at Harry, like he’s trying to say something with it. He doesn’t even know what he’s doing anymore, he’s so nervous.

If Harry doesn’t believe him after this, then Zayn doubts anything could convince him.

“Say it.”

“What?”

Harry’s eyes shine with something – tears, frustration, helplessness, fear – as he says, “Say it. Tell me why,” again.

Zayn kneads his fingertips into his knees, keeping the rhythm of Harry’s heart he feels there as well. “Because you love the sound of your name too much.”

A heavy exhale. A weighted silence. Harry pulls open the box and gasps.

“How could you know?”

Zayn tries to shrug as nonchalantly as he can, but his palms are getting clammy. “Louis told me this morning. Said you wouldn’t know what he got you, so if I was the one to tell you what it is, that maybe you’ll believe that me and him are really here. And that you’re not going crazy.”

“Oh, I’m going crazy,” Harry says more to himself than anything, but he’s pulling the H out of the box and examining it closer. He must decide something, though, because it’s not a minute later that he’s raising his head and looking back at Zayn. “But I guess you’re really there.”

Zayn shrugs again. He feels shy now, embarrassed to be looked at all of a sudden, even if the only thing he wanted to get out of this was to be seen.

“You’re here,” Harry says again, probably trying to convince himself into believing it. “How can you actually be here?”

It’s a simple question, Zayn guesses. There must be a simple answer for it, anyway, but he doesn’t have it and neither do Louis or Nick, so Zayn’s forced to shrug again and say a very pathetic and dour sounding, “I don’t know.”

Louis pipes up with his own, “No one really knows. Nick, tell him no one knows how.” Nick does. Even adds that it’s Louis who’s saying it.

“This is just… I don’t think I can…”

“Hey,” Nick stands and walks over to Harry. He keeps their conversation as private as he can, but Nick knows Louis and Zayn can hear everything. Even so, though it’s full of Harry saying he can’t do this and Nick reassuring him there’s nothing to do in the first place, no one tries to stop Harry when he says he needs to get back to work.

Nick and Louis might not, but Zayn knows it’s Harry’s day off. That either means he’s obviously lying and just needs to get away from them all or that he’s actually going back to work and is willing to physically fight Moira for a shift.

Knowing Harry as much as he does – and Zayn would like to think he does – it could be either one.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Zayn follows his heart.

The moment he realizes he’s doing it, he feels like a damsel in distress or really, searching for the damsel in distress in the maze that is the Angels Memorial hospital in the early hours of the morning. Drifting through the halls and sliding right past center stage, it’s not as busy as when Harry and Zayn were catching each other’s eyes, asking questions and giving hopeful answers as fast and innocuous as possible. There’s even a few beds empty.

Zayn finds Harry in the break room, lying on the bottom of the bunk in the corner. He’s on his back, eyes open and aimed at the bed above him. His arms are crossed. He’s still in his scrubs. At least they’re clean.

Zayn almost says _There you are_ , with the same kind of relief he feels at the sight of Harry. Almost though, because there’s something about how tense Harry’s shoulders are even as he’s lying down that takes that relief and morphs it straight into worry, into apprehension.

So Zayn sits down on the opposite bottom bunk with his hands between his knees, for some reason, feeling more than a little chastised. Not that there’s any reason for it. Harry insisted on being clinically insane and Zayn just wanted to prove him wrong. He just wanted to show Harry that he isn’t a figment of his imagination or a symptom to cure.

Watching Harry, seeing the way he hasn’t even so much as looked over at Zayn, observing the steady rise and fall of his chest, moving with each breath he takes, and knowing that Harry has no more real reasons to doubt Zayn’s realness, his hereness, there’s really only one thing Zayn wants to do.

So, he gets up and kneels right next to Harry’s bed, sitting on his shins. The floor is going to get too hard for his knees soon, but Zayn learned not to focus on the pain anymore.

He waits for any kind of acknowledgement and when he sees Harry sigh deeply, when he hears that deep and heavy exhale, Zayn reaches out and takes hold of Harry’s hand. He pulls only a little and Harry’s relents, uncrosses his arms and hands himself over.

It’s strange, being able to touch someone like this after years and years of only passing through people, to finally have someone who still has a pulse, who’s warm and soft and alive. Skimming his thumb over the back of Harry’s hand, Zayn can feel the frail fine hairs move underneath his touch.

Zayn can touch Louis but it’s like touching a shadow. He thinks he feels it, like his brain can’t function with the idea of hitting nothing when he clasps Louis on the back. It’s more of a substitution, though, a fictional contact Zayn’s almost forgot the actual feeling of.

Touching Harry, though, running his fingers over his palm and the life lines there, the purple veins around his wrist, the bone that sticks out just so much that Zayn gets stuck there, feels like he’s touching the memories he’s forgotten.

When Harry’s breath hitches as Zayn hold his middle finger between his index and thumb, grazing his nail over the length of it, Zayn says, “I was standing at the end of the bed. I could tell that it was different, but I didn’t know how. I could just tell.” Zayn goes back to pressing his thumb along the mismatched lines running along Harry’s palm. “When Louis came to stand next to me, he asked me if I could make you stop,” he very nearly whispers right into Harry’s fingers. Harry’s pulse runs from his fingers into Zayn’s, one beat at a time, steady, softly. “I told him it doesn’t work like that. We can’t just go around talking to people. Usually,” Zayn smiles to himself and carefully looks up to see Harry watching their hands. “Usually, people don’t see us. But Louis didn’t listen. I don’t really know how it works, because there’s no one there to tell us, but there’s a light.” When Harry looks up at him, Zayn says, “There’s a light that we have to lead them to.” He doesn’t say the people who have passed from here to there, from there to here. It’s understood. “For Louis, and for me, there was no light.”

There’s something in Harry’s eyes when he finally looks up at Zayn that makes him go on.

“Louis kept coming back here to check up on you. He was worried, because you didn’t take any time off. After.” Because it’s always after when Zayn and Louis are concerned. No one ever asks what came before, like it doesn’t matter. But for Louis it does. Before, it was Nick and Teddy and Harry. All of them left behind in the after.

“I didn’t want to stop working,” Harry whispers. He looks away from their hands, back to the bottom of the mattress above him. “I kept thinking that I just needed to stay busy. Keep my mind off it.”

Zayn sighs at Harry’s words, because he imagines everyone thinks that. If you pretend it didn’t happen, then it didn’t happen – it’s the type of wishing that never works.

“I thought Moira was going to get me fired. She almost did,” Harry’s lips pull up at the corners at that, thinking of the memory as something fond.

“I watched you too. When Louis asked me to.”

Harry’s eyes move back to him.

“Every time I came here, you were working. I thought okay, he’s dedicated to what he does, because I forgot.” It’s another one of those things that happen after. “We forget these things. It’s… I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter to us, because of what we do. What we are,” Zayn says, thickly, his voice strained.

After a heartbeat passes between them, Harry asks, “What are you?” almost reverently, incredulously, like he’s still holding on to hope that it’s all one big misunderstanding.

“It depends. Louis says we’re grim reapers. You called me the angel of death,” he shrugs. “It depends.”

“What do you call it?”

Zayn smiles. “I like when people think we’re angels.” Especially the little ones, still so innocent and pure and good. “For a time, though, I thought I was some kind of a devil,” Harry squeezes his hand at this, their roles reversed. “Bringing death everywhere I went.”

“I like angels,” Harry says after a pause, when he doesn’t take his eyes of Zayn’s. And there is it, Zayn thinks as they look at each other, he’s finally being seen. Harry’s eyes are imploring when he says it, maybe with regretfulness for the death part, maybe it’s with regretfulness for not believing at first. Zayn doesn’t blame him for either.

“I like angels too.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

_Noah Daniels – “I’m here for you”_

Nick and Louis take it upon themselves to invite Harry, and Zayn if he wants, to come to dinner. A casual thing, Nick calls it. There’s no ifs or buts, Louis says. If anyone would believe Zayn, he’d say he can’t come because he’s suddenly got a headache. It’s an excuse Harry very nearly uses, but because that would mean Zayn would have to go alone, he ends up almost dragging Harry over to Nick’s.

It’s weird. And not just in the normal, two dead, two alive people sitting around the same table, weird. No. It’s weird, because Louis drags his chair about an inch away from Nick’s and while Zayn sees Nick leaning into Louis’ embrace, he knows Harry isn’t seeing that.

What Harry is seeing is Nick leaning into empty, thin air.

There’s also the little issue, which seems to be an issue for Harry, of Zayn and Louis not eating. Zayn tells him underneath his breath, “Just pretend we’re not hungry,” when he raises his eyebrow at the empty place-setting in front of Zayn.

Harry chokes on his sip of wine, but otherwise nods with the underlying understanding of _no duh._

It’s Louis, though, because isn’t it always, who makes it nearly fucking unbearable to sit at the table.

Harry, it seems, is going through an adjustment period, which is more than understandable to Nick and Zayn at least. To Louis, who keeps yelling, “Why is he ignoring me?” across the table, as if Harry can hear him, shouting, “Will you just grow up already!” as if that makes it any different, it’s less so.

When Louis says, “Ask him how work is,” and Nick says, “Louis wants to know how work is going,” with a hopeful little smile, but all Harry does is stiffens up and closes his eyes with the notion of not being able to do this in practice, now that it’s happening and not just an invitation anymore, it all goes to absolute shit.

Maybe Harry is so stiff because right before his shift ended, a patient, not much older than Harry, Noah Daniels, was admitted with a severe migraine and a tingly sensation in his arm. For how simple the symptoms were, Zayn still had to tell Harry that he can feel Noah, barely but he did.

And so Harry went to work.

Harry asked Noah what he was doing when the migraine started, what the tingly sensation felt like. Noah was running with his friend, just going for a quick five miles after work.

Zayn stood there, watching them talk, Harry doing some sort of tests, without knowing why he felt Noah so strongly, each minute a strong beat of his heart in his heartbeat.

“Something doesn’t feel right,” Zayn had said and Harry had nodded, both at Noah and Zayn.

When Noah couldn’t extend both hands in front of him, the left one staying where he had it placed in his lap – that’s when Zayn saw the tension change on Harry’s face. It went from slightly worried to frantic in less time than it took him to press that red button and yell out, “Code blue!”

Though they tried, they couldn’t save Noah. A stroke, Harry said. A stroke, even though Noah was visibly fit and not much older than Harry. Just like that.

Zayn had to explain it to Noah, how it happened.

It was the first time Harry was there too, explaining everything with Zayn, even if he couldn’t see Noah.

Harry’s face looks similar to how it did when Zayn came back from walking Noah to the otherside – closed-off, pinched, overwhelmed.

“What’s happening?” Louis leans closer to the table, closer to Harry. “Why is he doing that?” he asks Nick, but Nick just shrugs, repeats it out loud, as if he’s Louis’ soundboard.

Zayn can’t stop looking at Harry though, how he’s shaking his head and trying to watch the space next to Nick as if he just isn’t trying hard enough.

“Nick?” Louis asks, the first quiet thing he’s said all evening.

Though Louis looks pale with worry, it’s Harry’s back Zayn touches with a comforting hand. It’s Harry who can’t do this, but Louis seems to be the only one at the table not able to understand that it’s fucking horrible, knowing your dead best friend is sitting opposite you, asking how you’re doing as if that’s normal, like it’s a thing that happens – like it’s ever even supposed to happen.

“Harry,” Nick finally edges, “are you, er, okay?”

Harry shakes his head again, his eyes peering into the empty space Louis occupies. “It’s too…” and then he closes his eyes, pushes his chair back and disappears behind the patio doors.

Louis stands up too, even takes a step away from the table as if he’s about to go after him, but it must be then that he remembers that he can’t just go after Harry, because his shoulders slump and tense up both at the same time.

“Babe,” Nick says as he reaches for Louis’ hand. Zayn watches their fingers intertwine, follows the motion of it, obviously a thing of habit by now, but then he thinks of how Harry sees it. How all he’d see would be Nick’s fingers hanging on to nothing.

Zayn sends Louis a look that means something like _Let me_ and _it’s not your fault_ , as he stands up to go after Harry, because it isn’t Louis’ fault. Zayn’s pretty sure it isn’t anyone’s fault, though the guilt is palpable in the air around them.

When he gets to the patio, he sees Harry standing in front one of the windows, looking inside.

Zayn goes to stand right next to Harry and over his shoulder, he sees Louis wrapped up in Nick’s arms, his face pressed into Nick’s chest. Nick running his fingers through Louis’ hair. He turns to look at Harry and sees how he watches Nick, his arms wrapped around nothing, no one pressed against his chest, hand running through nothing.

It should look ridiculous, but it doesn’t, because Zayn’s pretty sure it looks exactly like it did when Louis was still alive.

It’s just when Zayn’s about to suggest they leave to get some fresh air, away from Nick, but more importantly, away from Louis, that Harry starts to cry.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

They’re quiet as they walk down the street, quiet through the park and all the way to Harry’s apartment. They walk up the stairs, Harry and Zayn right behind him, in silence. It’s the first time Zayn feels like an actual ghost around him.

Harry unlocks the door and Zayn waits. He opens the door, takes off his shoes and doesn’t close it after himself. Zayn takes it as an invitation.

After Zayn does close and then locks the door, he hears the sink running in the kitchen and just as he walks in, Harry puts an empty glass on the counter. Zayn tries to remember when the last time he’s had a glass of water was, but he can’t.

As he stands there, he tries to think of the last big thing from his life that he remembers. Something happening at work, something with his family – a birth, a death, anything in between – but it’s like there’s nothing there. On the bad days, when everyone seems to be dying and he hasn’t stepped foot outside the hospital, it almost feels like he was never alive at all.

When he looks up, he sees Harry watching him. His eyes are still swollen and red from the tears, still glassy with the hurt of it all. Harry cocks his head to the side, and Zayn mirrors him if only because he looks like he’s deciding something – Zayn wants to know why, but in the state Harry’s in, he’s afraid to ask.

Having made up his mind, apparently, and not telling Zayn even if it obviously has something to do with him, Harry strides through the space between them in one, two, three long steps with his long legs and then he’s in front of Zayn, reaching for his face, holding it between his hands. He runs his thumb over Zayn’s cheek, right underneath his eye. It lights up something in the pit of Zayn’s chest, right next to where he can feel Harry’s heart speeding up.

Slower than Zayn is expecting if he’s even expecting it, Harry starts leaning in for a desperate yet carefully soft kiss.

Zayn doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t, because he can’t bring himself to. The few seconds they stand there, lips touching, chest to chest, and his face warming up from Harry’s hands, are enough to instill the fear of moving into Zayn, because what if it all goes to hell if he does? What if it all breaks apart around him if he gives in and kisses Harry back?

The chances are discouraging to say the least and Zayn’s never been particularly lucky – the position he’s in right now attests to that quite well – but then again, as of late, he’s been giving in more often than not with surprisingly favorable outcomes. Also, waste not want not, and if that saying has ever been true it’s right now.

He can’t keep himself from kissing Harry back.

Still, Zayn blinks his eyes once, just enough to catch a glimpse of Harry’s determined line of his brows and makes up his mind before the next second catches up to him.

Carefully, with the kind of patience and care he didn’t think he had in himself, Zayn closes his lips around Harry’s and kisses him back.

When nothing bad happens, he does it again.

And then again.

And again.

And then, Harry kisses him back too.

Just like that, they’re kissing. Chasing after each other, pushing and pulling each other closer together, Harry’s thumbs pressed into Zayn’s cheek and then behind his ears, on his cheek again. Zayn twists his fingers into Harry’s shirt at his front, tugs with everything he has, because all he feels is warmth and all he smells is Harry and if Zayn can help it, he’s not letting go of him again.

Zayn touches his tongue to Harry’s lip, looking to get a taste, hoping his hands aren’t too cold, that he doesn’t smell too sweet, that Harry never lets go of his face, apprehensive with it all.

Harry does though, he lets go and steps forward, pushing Zayn along with him and catching him with his hands around his hips until they’re stumbling backwards, one step for each time Zayn kisses Harry again.

Step, kiss, step, kiss, they walk until Zayn’s falling onto the couch and pulling Harry right along with him.

“Ouch,” Harry whispers against Zayn’s mouth with a wince.

“What, what is it?” Zayn’s looking over him, worried he’s bitten his lip too hard, that he’s holding on too strongly. He’s not letting go, though, he isn’t, so Harry will just have to live with it.

“No, nothing,” Harry says against his neck then, licking a line right up to his jaw, “Nothing, nothing,” he keeps saying, right into Zayn’s skin.

“Nothing,” Zayn says too, agreeing, lost in the way Harry’s pulling at him and biting into his skin with sharp teeth and a soothing tongue. “Nothing.”

“God,” Harry groans then, as he rolls his hips downwards and _god_ is fucking right.

It’s like Zayn’s being warmed from the inside out, as if a fire has been lit in the middle of his chest and he needs to move to get it out and keep it in and give it to Harry all at the same time. Harry’s setting him on fire and Zayn didn’t even know he was flammable until now. Now, that he’s on fucking fire.

Reeling things back in and getting himself under control, he grabs for Harry’s hips and pulls him down onto himself until they’re hips to hips and Harry’s closing his eyes on the next groan. The sound is nearly ripped out of him, loud and unrestrained, and it gets Zayn so hard so quick, he shakes with it.

“Just…” Harry says the next time he rolls his hips, down and forward, as close to Zayn as he can get, “Just like this.” It’s murmured messily into the crook of Zayn’s neck where he leaves a bite, then a kiss. And all Zayn can do is nod. Nod and move his hips along with Harry’s.

It’s all happening so fast, that Zayn doesn’t even realize he’s chasing his release until it’s right there, on the tip of his tongue that he’s touching against Harry’s jaw, right at the hinge of it.

Zayn gasps, trembles with it, with Harry in his hands, he even tries to say, “Harry,” but doesn’t know if he manages when he tips over the edge and almost climbs out of his skin with the intensity of it. Before he’s even had a chance to catch his breath, Harry is digging his nails into his shoulder and pressing his lips against Zayn’s again in a frantic kiss and a choked off groan.

The smoke from Zayn’s chest dissipates slowly.

As Zayn tries to understand what just happened, he runs his hand up and down Harry’s back, following the line his spine makes, the dips at the small of his back, letting his fingers rest at the skin where his shirt has risen up.

Harry’s is still so warm, so alive, but more than anything, even with the warmth of the fire inside him and Harry all around him, the fact Zayn still isn’t crashes around him a bit. Little by little it trickles back into his mind.

There’s about a million thoughts running through Zayn’s head as he lets Harry lie on top of him, feeling the way he breathes in and breathes out, in and out. But Harry’s mind must be clearer, less occupied, because after a few more moments of gentle quietness, he raises his head enough to peer down at Zayn through half-lidded eyes.

He hums, thinking something to himself and not telling Zayn a word of it.

Watching him with something like trepidation, Harry starts to get up and Zayn truly begins to panic, because what in the hell have they just done? What was Zayn thinking? Though, clearly there wasn’t any kind of thinking involved, not when Harry’s desperation was dripping from his fingers like it was, his heart pounding away with it in Harry’s and Zayn’s chests, both.

It’s not like Zayn wasn’t desperate for it too.

That excuse must be wearing thin by this point, but no one has warned Zayn about this. There has been no: _Do not get involved with the living!_ in the beginners guide to being the grim reaper. Zayn panics, but thinks he doesn’t really have much to go on either way. He might as well wing it.

But, all Harry does is stand on his two feet and offers a hand to Zayn. Zayn takes it, fast as anything, and still without a word, Harry leads Zayn to his bedroom, all the way to the side of the bed Harry always sleeps on.

Zayn takes a moment to remember standing in the doorway, not letting himself come any closer and watching Harry lie there, with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling and frowning, as if he was trying to convince himself to fall asleep. Even when he did, it was fitful and restless. He’d wake with every turn, making Zayn’s skin crawl as it looked as if he’d seen him when Harry’s eyes glanced at the door as he turned around. He didn’t, at least not then.

Now, Harry sits down on his bed and pulls Zayn down to sit next to him.

“Do you need to, um, clean up?”

Zayn blushed as the mess in his jeans registers – sticky and gross now that he doesn’t have Harry on top of him anymore. He nods, says an uncertain, “Yes,” and only stands up when Harry tells him he knows where the bathroom is. Zayn doesn’t take long. He also leaves his jeans in a pile on the floor and goes back to the bedroom in just a t-shirt and his underwear. Going commando is still uncomfortable, even in the after of life.

Harry has also ditched most of his clothes and is now lying snugly in bed. Watching him from the doorway, Zayn doesn’t remember standing here and wishing he could crawl into bed next to Harry, but that either means he’s forgotten it altogether or that the possibility of it ever happening was so unthinkable, he didn’t even dare to wish for it. Either or, Zayn tries to return the soft smile Harry is giving him from where he’s tucked his head halfway underneath the duvet.

It’s heavy and it’s warm underneath. Harry’s mattress is firm, there’s practically no give when he slides underneath the duvet and tangles his legs with Harry’s.

He’s trying to act as if any of this is completely normal. Harry is probably doing the same. Neither of them mention it.

“You don’t sleep,” Harry murmurs once Zayn’s settled.

It’s less of a happy smile that tugs on Zayn’s mouth as he says, “Most nights, you don’t either.”

Sighing, Harry closes his eyes. “Seriously. I’m serious. What do you do at night?”

“The difference between night and day becomes a lot less apparent when you’re dead.” Which sounds just about as horrible as it is. “I work,” Zayn goes on when Harry still hasn’t opened his eyes. “I’m usually at the hospital. Or with Louis somewhere.” Most often than not, at least lately, he’s been where Harry was, not that Zayn’s ever going to admit that out loud.

“Do you miss sleep?”

Saying _I don’t remember_ again, like Zayn does to most things that test his memory, somehow, for right now, when Harry’s blinking slowly at him and his voice is rough with exhaustion, doesn’t sit right with him. So instead, Zayn traces Harry’s lips with his eyes before he raises his hand to trace it with just the tip of his finger, and says, “I do.”

It makes Harry smile again.

“You’re a good kisser,” Harry whispers then, all conspiratorially like, as if it’s this big secret. And it probably is. Apropos of absolutely nothing, he even gives Zayn’s fingertip a kiss.

“Thank you?” Zayn whispers back, not even fighting the smile pulling at his lips.

“This is the part where you tell me I’m a good kisser too.”

Or, this would be the part that Zayn reminds Harry that he hasn’t kissed anyone in longer than he can remember. More than fifty years, Harry had said. It’s been a long, long time.

Zayn tells him he’s a good kisser too. He does get a kiss in return for it, though. A slow, lingering kiss that warms him better than the duvet does.

“I wish we could’ve met…” Harry starts to say, but it’s like he can’t think of the word. So in lieu of watching Harry frown again, Zayn helps him, because if there’s anything Zayn’s good at, it’s helping people find the right way.

“…before.”

Harry nods. And then kisses him again. When he settles back down on his pillow, Zayn goes back to tracing his bottom lip, his fingertip light as anything, following the bow of his mouth.

“I like angel,” he whispers against Zayn’s finger, barely loud enough for him to hear. “Just angel. No death.”

Like the little ones who don’t really know what’s happening and tell Zayn’s he’s pretty, ask about his long black coat, ask if he’s an angel, Harry sounds too innocent to be talking to Zayn. Zayn knows Harry is far too innocent, but most importantly too alive to be talking to Zayn or to have him in his bed or to be pressing even closer to him, until his nose is right against the hollow of his throat, inhaling as if Zayn doesn’t smell sickeningly sweet.

But all Harry does is hum and sigh. Before Zayn can tell him that it’s death that makes him an angel to begin with, that there’s no Zayn without death, Harry’s asleep and Zayn no longer knows what to think.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

_Abby – It’s a slow day, but slow days are never good_

It’s Wednesday.

Harry’s lying on one of the broken, unused beds in the hallway that never seem to get moved or thrown away. He has his legs pulled up at the knees and his head on Zayn’s thigh, because Zayn refuses to lie own on a bed in a hospital.

“Did you die here?” Harry asks around a bite of his sandwich. The lettuce crunches under his teeth. It’s an unsettling question coming from Harry. It’s unsettling that Harry thinks of him as being dead even though that’s what Zayn is. It’s just that Zayn would rather have Harry think of him as just Zayn. Zayn, and nothing else.

The answer, though typical, is also somewhat unsettling.

“I don’t remember,” Zayn says and tries not to feel how that knot in his stomach tightens, because it does, with every single thing he forgets or can’t remember or doesn’t even know happened any longer, it gets tighter and heavier and hotter. And not the pleasant kind of hot, either. 

Harry frowns. “What do you remember?”

“Everything’s gone a bit blurry around the edges,” is the best Zayn can do to explain it. “It’s like I was drunk for all my life and now things are in pieces and I don’t know what’s memory and what I’m making up. Mostly though, I just can’t remember.”

“That’s sad,” Harry says, and for how obvious the statement is, because of course it’s fucking devastating, it rings sympathetic in Zayn’s ears and he smiles down at him, trying to convey that the sentiment is received and welcomed.

“I’ve got other things to focus on now.”

“Like dead people,” Harry grumbles, lowering his voice and sounding almost like some kind of a monster.

“Like dead people,” he agrees with a laugh that he feels from his toes to the top of his ears. For being dead decades and decades, Harry makes him feel more alive that Zayn probably ever was.

There’s something, a blurriness here or a blurriness there, that makes him feel like he’s been in love before. Like he’s known what it’s like to be loved and to be in love, to care for someone more than he did himself. But it wasn’t like this. Zayn doubts anyone has ever made him feel like Harry does.

It might just as well be because he’s dead and Harry is making him remember, in his own way, how it was all those years ago, to have a beating heart and to breathe and to laugh when he was genuinely happy. But then it can’t be just that. It can’t be. Zayn won’t let it.

Harry goes on a rant about his most hopeless patients. He mentions Ricky and his punctured heart, Jolie with her massive seizure, Timothy and his five year old shattered femur. It’s all names and faces and stories that Harry knows like they all happened during his morning shift, but Zayn was there during those early hours and he knows for a fact there was no Ricky or Jolie or Timothy.

It’s just one of those Harry things, Zayn’s found, to care so much and so intensely that he doesn’t forget not one of his past patients. Sure, Harry admits himself that he doesn’t remember all of them, but he tries to. He says, with a frown and uncertainty, “I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t remember anymore. I know all about dementia and Alzheimer’s, we even have this patient,” Harry chuckles and Zayn wishes he could remember her name, “she’s forgotten everything. Just… everything and everyone. It makes you think, you know.”

Zayn, in that moment, as Harry keeps talking about another patient of his and keeps laughing as he’s telling the story, can’t help himself, like the laughter is escaping him – Zayn thinks he’s probably a little bit in love with Harry.

Probably more than a bit. A lot more than just a little bit.

It’s almost on the tip of his tongue, because telling Harry won’t make anything bad happen – Zayn’s sure of that now, but only because nothing bad has happened yet – but it will make everything even more real.

It will make Zayn feel even more dead, for one. It will probably erase that smile off Harry’s lips and Zayn’s not in any way inclined to do that. It’ll make Louis snort and Nick coo. Zayn will blush and god knows what Harry will do. What he’d say.

Zayn doesn’t know if Harry feels the same. He guesses asking him would be a surefire way to find out and it’s not like Zayn doesn’t have the time to wait and see if Harry tells him himself.

Zayn thinks with a snort, it’s like he’s running out of time, just as Harry’s pager goes off.

“Give me a sec,” Harry says as he pulls it from his pocket and frowns at the number there.

Taking his phone out of his other pocket, he dials a number and waits maybe half a second before it’s picked up.

“Doctor Styles here,” Harry’s voice changes as he says it. He sounds much more grown up, much more in charge than he was telling Zayn how awful gastric obstructions were and all the things he’s found as the obstructing culprits over the years.

And then everything turns upside down, because Harry’s scrambling off the bed and getting his shoes back on.

“Where are you? What happened?” Harry practically cries down the phone. Zayn can feel the heart in his chest jump in a stutter.

“Harry?” he whispers, still sitting on the bed, waiting for something to happen, to feel something coming.

“I’ll be at the door,” Harry says right before he hangs up.

In the second it takes him to tell Zayn to follow him over his shoulder, Zayn can see his eyes are red-rimmed and wet.

“Harry?” Zayn calls after him then, because Harry’s gone off in a run and god dammit, something’s happened but Zayn has no idea what.

He catches up to Harry right before he pushes past the swinging doors of the ER, breathing heavily already, looking around, waiting to see something.

“It’s Abby,” Harry tells him then, without Zayn having to ask again. “A medic called me, they have Abby.”

Abby, Zayn thinks. _Abby_. He doesn’t remember an Abby.

“Who’s Abby,” Zayn asks right as he hears the siren.

It’s only a few seconds later, in which Harry starts running towards the ambulance and pulling open the doors to get to Abby faster, that Zayn hears the, “Abby Styles, seventy-two years old, complaining of shortness of breath and pain in her chest due to palpitations, BP eighty over forty.”

“What happened?” Harry asks immediately after, clinging to the side of Abby’s stretcher. They’re wheeling her into the ER and right to center stage, Zayn following, confused, behind them.

Abby pulls the mask the paramedics have put on her off and wheezes, “Nothing, honey. I’m fine.”

“Why are you in a hospital, then?” Harry asks frantically. “Tell me what happened,” he instructs. He’s leaned over the bed and while he waits for her answer, everyone around Abby’s bed, another doctor and three nurses are all waiting for Harry.

“I thought,” she breathes out. She puts the mask back on for a few moments before she’s able to say, “I thought it was a heart attack.”

Harry looks at her with wide eyes, clearly shocked. Everyone still waits. And then Harry nods.

“Right,” he says, still looking at Abby. There’s a second long pause that somehow stretches longer that a single moment ever should. Harry seems to inhale deeply then, and Zayn wonders if it’s unusual even if he’s never seen Harry take sure a deep, steadying breath before. At least not in the ER, on center stage.

The second passes after an age in which Zayn gets worried enough about Harry to come stand right behind him, closer to Abby’s head and then Harry starts, “Patient history includes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and right-sided pneumonectomy due to non-small cell lung cancer. No history of prior myocardial infraction or coronary artery disease.”

Abby manages a smile behind her mask, but otherwise, the only people moving are the doctor and the nurses. Harry just stands there, talking, looking down at Abby.

“Give her an ECG and call cardio.” Harry looks at the nurse then. “The patient seems stable, heart rhythm is fast but controlled, I suspect either SVT or VT. Page Palmer, I think he’s on call.”

“What do you mean,” the nurse asks, stopping in her tracks with a couple fluid bags in her arms.

“I mean I can’t treat family members, so Palmer is going to take over for me.”

The nurse, and Zayn too, look from Abby to Harry. The nurse nods, whereas Zayn thinks Abby looks familiar, but can’t remember from where.

When Palmer does show up, he says, “Good call, Styles. I’ll take care of her,” under his breath to Harry and Harry nods back at him.

Zayn call Harry doesn’t want to leave. He’s lingering at the edge of the bed and clearly getting in the way of everyone else, so, making a decision for him, Zayn steps up behind him and wrapping his arms around Harry’s middle, he pulls him away gently, with slow, careful steps.

Harry goes easily.

It’s only a few steps before they’re nearly at the break room. That’s when Zayn grabs a hold of Harry’s hand instead and leads him inside, closing the door behind them.

Soundlessly, Harry moves to the nearest chair and sits down. It looks like he’s staring at the floor between him and Zayn, but really, Harry isn’t looking at anything right now. Not when Zayn pulls another chair next to Harry’s and not when he reaches for his hand again.

Harry sits there, his eyes on the floor and his mind whirring a hundred miles an hour.

Zayn didn’t understand any of what Harry had said and he doesn’t have a particular interest in any of it, but he does want to know who Abby is, if her Styles is the same as Harry’s, if Harry not only knows her, but also cares for her.

To calm Harry does, or trying to at least, Zayn leans close to him and whispers, “I don’t feel her.”

After another long second, Harry blinks and then turns his head to look at Zayn from the corner of his eye.

“I didn’t feel her coming and I don’t feel her now,” he says, only a bit louder. It’s true. There isn’t so much as a whisper of Abby anywhere near his fingers. Not even so much as in the tips of his nails. “She’s going to be fine,” Zayn adds, in case Harry needs the simplest version of what he’s trying to say.

Zayn watches Harry swallow draying, thinks he sees him nod, but isn’t sure and then lets him lean his head against Zayn’s shoulder. Harry squeezes his hand around Zayn’s fingers.

There’s no memory Zayn can recall of what it feels like to have a person you love in the hospital, sick and unwell, but after years of being surrounded by critical patients who sometimes barely make it, only by the skin of their teeth, he doesn’t have to remember how _he_ had felt. He just needs to remember the day before and what some of the people in the hallways had looked like.

There was a kid sitting in the waiting room, only a bit older than the little ones who always think they’re angels. He shouldn’t have been there, on a chair, all alone, in Angels’ Memorial. He looked like he didn’t even know where he was, but the young ones never do – they never ask, “Where am I?” like a lot of the others do.

He wasn’t crying either, just playing with the toy truck that couldn’t have been bigger than Zayn’s hand.

The older ones – parents, spouses, partners – always cry when they’re waiting just outside center stage. They hiccup as they try to catch their breath, try to catch up with what’s going on. Every inhale brings them closer to knowing what it feels like to hear, “We’re sorry,” in a hospital. They cry, because there’s a chance they’ll finally know what, “everything we could do,” means, better than anyone ever wishes to. There will be tears stuck in their eyelashes and their cheeks will be wet. They will stumble through a few meaningless syllables and feel how grief settles in. First, it’s on the tip of their tongue, heavy and dry, so it’s hard to speak, until it slips down their throat like bile, tightening, constraining, bitter. It falls into their stomachs then, drops like a lead ball, with finality, because it’s going to stay there ever after. That’s usually when their knees give in.

Kids don’t know though. They don’t know what it means to sit in a hospital waiting room. They never run to center stage and scream at Harry. Kids don’t beg and please, they don’t make promises they can’t keep.

Kids sit on the chairs in the hallways and waiting rooms, playing with their toys.

All kids want is to go back home.

And by the looks of it, Harry is ready to go home, because really, everyone is somebody’s kid and Zayn would bet that Harry is Abby’s.

He asks, carefully, “Is she your mom?” and tries to remember his own. The only thing Zayn remembers – something he hopes he will never forget – is that she called him her _sonshine_. Even now, after years of being not here but neither there, Zayn is still her _sonshine_.

Harry sighs and says, “I was a foster kid,” and then, without realizing that Zayn wants to ask him at least twenty more questions now, he adds, “I liked Abby. She adopted me.”

“I heard she was a Styles too, yeah,” Zayn says, pulling Harry hand in his lap. He wants to keep Harry talking, thinking about something else than Abby lying there, on the bed just outside the break room door.

Harry is definitely the kind to go scream right in the doctor’s face. Zayn feels it in his bones.

Harry smiles and nods. “I was Harry Olson before. I never liked it though, because I never knew where I came from, I just had this name.”

“Styles suits you,” Zayn knocks his shoulder against Harry’s, “What with all those _style_ -ish shirts you have hiding in your closet.”

Harry snorts. “You’re terrible.”

“I like the one with the flowers,” Zayn says and adds, “The one that’s completely see-through,” when Harry frowns.

“Ah, yeah. I like that one too.”

“Why don’t you ever wear them?” Zayn asks, because he’s been wondering ever since he’s first found them. He likes wandering through Harry’s closet now and again.

“I don’t have anywhere to wear them to.”

Zayn snorts this time. “You came to Nick and Louis’ dinner in your scrubs last time.”

Harry shrugs then. “I don’t know. I like my scrubs.”

“I do too, but they’re not see-through.”

Harry closes his eyes and shakes his head at Zayn, but he’s smiling too, even pressing it against Zayn’s lips for a second or two, so Zayn will take it as a win.

Zayn tries to keep Harry’s mind occupied every way he knows how, but there’s only so much he can do when every ten minutes, a siren cuts through Harry explaining either how he broke his foot when he was five years old and got fascinated with doctors because of his first hospital visit or telling Zayn how for the first three years of medical school, he was regretting ever wanting anything to do with the profession.

All Zayn can tell him is that he remembers he went to school, but he doesn’t know exactly what he studied.

It’s a while later, when Zayn can tell Harry is exhausted and only awake to hear any news about Abby. Zayn’s just about to suggest he lies down and letting Zayn wake him up as soon as someone has any news, when Palmer’s head appears in the doorway.

“You okay in here? I’ve got some news.”

Harry stands up and nods. “Yeah, what was it? How is she?”

Zayn comes to stand next to him and they listen to Palmer explain that she’s fine. “Abby’s doing great. The ECG on admission showed a regular broad complex tachycardia with 220 bpm. George from cardio performed an intracardiac ECG, which then showed SVT with intermittent 2:1 atrio-ventricular conduction.” Harry gasps and Zayn doesn’t understand a single word Palmer has said. “Radiofrequency ablation slowed the tachycardia to 1:1. She’s _fine_ now.”

It’s enough for Zayn to know that both Abby and Harry are going to be okay. Not that he didn’t trust himself, but things can go wrong too quickly in a hospital. He’s happy Harry wasn’t satisfied with his reassurance, though he doubts, as a doctor, Harry ever would be.

Even when Zayn tells him the patient is fine, that they’re not going anywhere, Harry still does everything he can and tries to do more still.

“Good. God,” Harry wipes his mouth. His hands are shaking again. “Good. Thank you.”

“Of course,” Palmer says. He clasps Harry on his arm. “She’s in room twenty-five-three.”

“Great. Thank you,” he says again. When Palmer leaves, Harry says, “Thank you,” to his back too. And then to the closed door. “Thank you.”

Zayn doesn’t know what else to do, so he hugs Harry, pulling him close and tight. He says, “She’s gonna be okay,” few times too, just because he thinks Harry needs to hear it a couple more times.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It’s been three days. Three days of barely speaking to Harry, of having no alone time, of Harry not being able to acknowledge Zayn with more than his eyes.

Zayn understands why Harry doesn’t want to leave the hospital and why he insists on sleeping in Abby’s room every night, he does. It doesn’t mean he likes it though.

Abby has been ordered to stay in the hospital for a few days, because of her age, so that her doctor can make sure she’s really fine after her surgery. There’s also the fact that Harry insisted, shouted a bit, even, that Abby isn’t leaving for minimum of three days, because _he_ has to make sure she’s going to be fine too.

Mostly, everyone listened to what Harry was telling them. Mostly, it was only Moira who told Harry to calm his tits, “Styles, you’re not the boss here. You should be happy I’m letting you stay in her bed at all.”

“As if you could keep me away,” Harry has boasted.

“Oh, you don’t want to try me,” Moira said in a low voice that ran chills down Zayn’s back. “Now, sit down and eat your lasagna.”

Harry huffs and groans – Zayn is trying not to laugh out loud – but he does sit down at the little table in Abby’s room.

It’s been a battle between Harry and Moira these past couple of days, because Moira – who is officially Zayn’s personal favorite hero – won’t let Harry work while he’s staying with Abby in her room. She’s telling him it’s because he’s compromised and obviously busy elsewhere, as well as, “focused on your mother, Harry, like you should be, now stop whining.”

It’s out of love, though, Zayn can clearly see that.

It’s only because of that reason that Harry actually listens to Moira and complains very little while doing exactly what she says. Besides, Abby is going home today and Zayn doesn’t know who’s happier – Harry, Abby, Moira or Zayn.

Abby is happy because she can finally go back home to Marvin and Precious, her two tabby cats, that Harry has explained have been Abby’s for the last ten years. Harry is happy, because he wants to go back to work and back to spending time with Zayn – he’s said so himself. Moira wants to be able to see less of Harry on a daily basis again and Zayn, well, any time he gets to spend with Harry is well spent, but he’s still had to wander the halls of the hospital and stick close to center stage no matter where Harry was.

He’s gotten into a routine of things lately and he’s happy he can go back to it after today.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It’s when they’re finally back in Harry’s bed, another three days after Abby’s gone home, that Harry is holding Zayn unusually tightly.

After letting him for a few moments, Zayn turns around and runs his fingers along Harry’s nose and over his closed eyes, coaxing him to open them.

“What’re you thinking about?” Zayn whispers, careful to not break the silence that’s settled around them. It’s late. Harry should’ve fallen asleep hours ago.

Blinking blearily at him, Harry mouths, “You,” with barely any sound to the word.

It almost makes Zayn smile at him, but he can’t decide if the look on Harry’s face means it’s happy or not so happy thoughts that have been keeping him awake. He asks Harry and has to wait for him to answer.

“What if you just… What if I stop being able to see you?”

Zayn swallows thickly at that. He wants to say that won’t happen. He does say it. Harry doesn’t look convinced. Zayn isn’t either.

He has no guarantee, neither of them do. Zayn could be gone to Harry in the next second and there wouldn’t be much, if anything at all, either of them could do about it. Zayn could just disappear, just like that.

“That won’t happen,” Zayn says again, trying to convince them both.

“How do you know?”

Zayn can’t say it’s a guess. He can’t admit that he doesn’t know anything, but Harry probably already knows that. The only thing Zayn can say it, “Life is rarely that unfair,” which doesn’t mean much in the end.

Harry chuckles, but it sounds hollow. He whispers, “I’m an ER attending.”

If anyone knows how unfair life can be, then it’s Harry. But it’s the only answer Zayn can come up with.

They have time, because no one is cruel enough to take any of it away from them. Nothing in the world could wish so much sorrow on them, to take them away from each other. Zayn just knows that much.

**Author's Note:**

> Quick summary: Harry is an emergency room/trauma doctor, and for the purposes of this fic, a lot of his patients don't make it. Their deaths are mostly wrapped in metaphors and euphemisms, but still, only so much. Zayn is a grim reaper, taking the patients that don't make it to the "otherside".   
> The second installment will be up as soon as I can manage.


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